STAGING TUDOR ROYALTY: RELIGIOUS POLITICS IN STUART HISTORICAL DRAMA (1603–1607)
by
Scott James Schofield
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Scott James Schofield (2010)
STAGING TUDOR ROYALTY: RELIGIOUS POLITICS IN STUART HISTORICAL DRAMA (1603–1607)
Scott James Schofield Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto 2010
ABSTRACT
Staging Tudor Royalty: Religious Politics in Stuart Historical Drama (1603–
1607) examines the plays and pageantry about the Tudor royals in the context of three major events: the Hampton Court Conference (1604), the Anglo-Spanish Peace
Negotiations (1603–1604) and the Gunpowder Plot (1605). Chapter 1 provides an historical survey of the political and legal controversies concerning religious belief and practice from Henry VIII’s creation of the royal supremacy (1533–1534) to Elizabeth’s final year as queen (1603). Chapters 2 through 5 comprise four case studies, each of which centres on a play or pageant about the Tudor royals and its relationship to one of the aforementioned events. Chapters 2 and 3 examine Thomas Heywood’s If You Knovv
Not Me, You Know No Bodie (1604) and Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know
Me (1604), dramatizations of Elizabeth’s years as princess and the later years of Henry
VIII’s reign respectively, in light of the puritan campaigns for church reform and religious toleration surrounding the Hampton Court Conference. Chapter 4 examines the uses of the Tudors in Thomas Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment , a detailed account of James’s royal entry of March 1604. In particular, I focus on the London-Dutch community’s celebration of Tudor religious and economic commitments to the Protestant
Low Countries in relation to the early Stuart negotiations for an end to the Anglo-Spanish war. Chapter 5 discusses Thomas Dekker’s allegorical rendering of the later decades of
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Elizabeth’s reign, The VVhore of Babylon (1607), as a commentary on the Stuart government’s response to Jesuit insurgency following the Gunpowder Plot. In order to situate these plays and pageants in their precise contexts, each of the four case studies incorporates a variety of historical evidence ranging from royal proclamations to religious polemics, from stories of martyrdom to state trials. This thesis offers a topical reading of play and pageantry in which the Tudor past engages with the seminal political- religious issues and controversies of early Stuart England.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While researching and writing this thesis I was awarded University of Toronto
Open Fellowships and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Graduate Fellowships. I am grateful to both the Department of English and the CRRS for their generous support. I am also grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library for permission to include the scanned images found in this thesis.
Many individuals have assisted and encouraged me over the years. I begin with my advisory committee. Anne Lancashire, my supervisor, has shown incredible patience and understanding while waiting for me to complete this dissertation. Her support, both personal and professional, is a major reason why after many years I completed this degree. I am equally indebted to Randy McLeod. I am particularly grateful for his complete dedication to my work, especially in the final stages. In addition to his reading and re-reading, editing and re-editing countless drafts, he has taught me the importance of taking pride in my ideas and standing proudly behind them. Leslie Thompson’s comments, particularly her final corrections to the thesis, were very helpful. I must also give special thanks to Joseph Black. His external report was thorough and the comments and questions he made at the oral examination were thoughtful.
Many other friends have been helpful over the years. Michael Ullyot read various chapters in the cramped quarters of a carrel at Robarts Library. His comments on my thesis, and our conversations on early modern literature and culture, have made me a better scholar. Travis DeCook, Peter Grav, Andrew Wallace and many others have also assisted by offering comments on different chapters. I am thankful for their thoughts and for their friendship. I am also grateful to Kim Yates, Stephanie Treloar, Milton Kooistra
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and the entire CRRS community. For many years now the Centre has been my second home.
I must also acknowledge my wonderful family. My parents explained to me from an early age the importance of pursuing your passion. My completion of a PhD is one result of that teaching. Many other family members have also shown their support over the years. Rejane Cote, in particular, ensured that I had space and time to complete an important section of the thesis. Finally, and most importantly, I must thank Carine. From the beginning to the end she has been my most ardent supporter, and for this reason I dedicate this dissertation to her.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii Preliminaries iii-xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: State Religion and Individual Belief: the Post-Reformation Debate from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I 14
a) Henry VIII 15 b) Edward VI 23 c) Mary I 27 d) Elizabeth I 30
Chapter 2: “We are her subject, and obay her hest”: Thomas Heywood’s 49 If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie (Part One) and the Politics of Toleration, c.1603–1605
Chapter 3: Tudor Frustrations and Hopes: When You See Me, You Know Me 82 and the Stuart Political-Religious Controversies of 1603–1604
Chapter 4: The Tudor Legacy of Pan-Protestantism: The Dutchmen’s Pageant, 120 Anglo-Spanish Peace Negotiations, and The Magnificent Entertainment (1604)
Chapter 5: After the Gunpowder Plot: Imagining Elizabethan Crisis in 146 Thomas Dekker’s The VVhore of Babylon (1607)
Coda 188
List of Works Cited and Consulted 190
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TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS OF EARLY MODERN TEXTS
As many of the texts quoted in this thesis do not appear in modern editions, I have chosen to quote directly from early sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions. Diplomatic transcriptions of early printed titles in the thesis, including the footnotes and the Works
Consulted, are either from original sources housed in University of Toronto collections or from Early English Books Online (EEBO). All transcriptions of early modern texts are in unregularized old-spelling, with u/v, i/j, and vv/w represented in their original forms.
Long s and ragged r are represented as s and r respectively. For modern editions of early modern texts (e.g. The Statutes of the Realm ), I follow the edition’s orthography. The initial letters of all principal words in titles are capitalized throughout according to MLA style. Spacing and indentation are also standardized in accordance with MLA. The title of
Thomas Heywood’s play on Elizabeth, for instance, appears on the title-page to the first quarto of 1605 as:
My transcription reads: “If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie: or, The Troubles of
Queene Elizabeth .” and “If You Knovv Not Me ” on all subsequent entries . Since early modern texts are notoriously mispaginated, I cite signatures throughout (e.g. B3v–B4r).
All dates follow the Tudor-Stuart calendar year beginning on 1 January (i.e. where 1
January 1604 immediately follows 31 December 1603), instead of the legal year beginning on 25 March (i.e. where 25 March 1604 immediately follows 24 March 1603).
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Transcriptions and Citations of Modern Texts
All citations are footnoted in full on first reference, and appear in shortened form on subsequent occasions. Parenthetical referencing is used only for early modern texts quoted extensively throughout the thesis. All other referencing conforms to MLA style.
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ABBREVIATIONS
CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Edward VI–Elizabeth I . Eds. Robert Lemon and M.A. Everett Green. 12 vols. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1856–72; James I–Charles I . Eds. John Bruce et al. 23 vols. 1858–1897. CSPV Calendar of State Papers: Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy . Eds. Rawdon Brown and G. Cavendish Bentinck. 38 vols. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1864–1947. EHR English Historical Review ELR English Literary Renaissance HJ Historical Journal HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission . Calendar of Salisbury (Cecil) MSS . London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1860–1976. JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History ODNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . 2nd ed. 2004–2008 ODNB Online . Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1 Blind Justice from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (London, 1583) page
STC 11224. 5
Figure 2 Image of Henry VIII enthroned from the title-page to The Great Bible
(London, 1539) STC 2068. 17
Figure 3 “The Miraculous Preseruation of Lady Elizabeth, nowe Queene of
England” in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1583)
STC 11225. 71
Figure 4 Image of Elizabeth enthroned from the title-page to Thomas Heywood,
If You Knovv Not Me (London, 1605) STC 13328. 79
Figure 5 “The Storie of Queene Katherine Parre” from John Foxe, Actes and
Monuments (London, 1583) STC 11225. 94
Figure 6 An image of Henry holding the Pope under foot while he receives the
English Bible from Actes and Monuments (London, 1583)
STC 11225. 98
Figure 7 Image of the “The Dutch Arch” from Stephen Harrison, The Arch’s of
Triumph (London, 1604) STC 12863a. 133
Figure 7a King David and King Josiah. Detail of “The Dutch Arch” from Stephen
Harrison, The Arch’s of Triumph (London, 1604) STC 12863a. 134
Figure 7b King Lucius and King Edward VI. Detail of “The Dutch Arch” from
Stephen Harrison, The Arch’s of Triumph (London, 1604)
STC 12863a. 135
Figure 8 Image of King James VI of Scotland in armour from Théodore
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de Bèze, Icones (Geneva, 1580). 143
Figure 9 Image of The Whore of Babylon from Hugh Broughton, A Concent of
Scripture (London, 1590) STC 3851. 149
Figure 10 “The Order Of Time Wherevnto the Contents of this Booke are to be
Refered” from The Holy Bible (London, 1599) STC 2178. 185
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INTRODUCTION
Samuel Rowley’s history of Henry VIII’s reign, When You See Me, You Know Me
(1605) 1 engages at large with the quintessential controversies of the English Reformation.
Significantly, while the play dramatizes events from 1544–1546, it simultaneously engages with the political-religious controversies of 1604–1605. This use of the Tudor past to comment on Stuart politics would have resonated with Rowley’s first audiences as a topical rendering of history. Indeed, topical treatments of this kind are consistently found in the Stuart drama on the Tudor royals, and this sub-genre is the focus of this thesis.
The most contentious scene in When You See Me, which is based loosely on an account found in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs ,2 involves King Henry’s presiding over a political-religious debate between his wife, Queen Katherine Parr, and two members of his episcopacy, Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner. This debate intensifies the moment Katherine questions the legitimacy of the pope’s authority in England. “Pray tell me,” she asks, “why would ye make the King beleeue / His Highnesse and the people vnder him, / Are tyde so strictly to obay the Pope?” Quick to respond, Bishop Bonner replies, “Because faire Queene he is Gods Deputie.” Unconvinced, Katherine continues her critique:
1 When You See Me, You Know Me, or The Famous Chronicle Historie of King Henry the Eight, with the Birth and Vertuous Life of Edvvard Prince of Wales (London, 1605) STC 21417. All quotations are from this quarto. 2 Foxe’s account, entitled “The Story of Queene Katherine Parre…Wherein Appeareth in what Daunger she was for the Gospell” is found in all four printed editions produced during Foxe’s lifetime. See The Actes and Monuments (London, 1563, rev. 1570, 1576, 1583) STC 11222–11225. The few substantive variants existing among the different editions of the story are searchable in the new variorum edition. See John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments[…] The Variorum Edition . (Sheffield, 2004). Available from http://www.hrionline.shef.ac.uk/foxe/. [Accessed: 21.07.2009]. For different critical assessments of the story’s historical validity, see Glyn Redworth, In Defense of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) 231–237, Susan E. James, Kathryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Ashgate: Aldershot, 1999) 253–280, David Starkey, Six Wives:The Queens of Henry VIII (New York: Harper Collins, 2003) 760–765.
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Queen. So are all Kings; and God himselfe commaunds
The King to rule, and people to obay,
And both to loue and honour him:
But you that are sworne seruants vnto Rome ,
How are ye faithfull subiects to the King,
When first ye serue the Pope then after him?
Gard. Madame these are that sectes of Lutherans,
That makes your Highnesse so mistake the Scriptures,
Your slender arguments thus aunswered
Before the King, God must be worshipped.
Queen. Tis true, but pray ye answere this:
Suppose, the King by Proclamation,
Commaunded you and euery of his subiects,
On paine of death, and forfeit of his goods,
To spurne against the Popes authoritie:
Yee know the Scripture binds yee to obey him,
But this I thinke, if that his Grace did so,
Your slight obedience all the world should know. (H2v–H3r)
As one of the play’s three chief supporters of evangelical reform (the two others being
Henry’s son, Prince Edward, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer),
Katherine regularly defends the Lutheran-inspired version of sola scriptura . A centrepiece of English and European Protestantism throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, this doctrine insisted that the biblical scriptures be used as the
3 basis to define Christian belief and practice. Katherine shows her commitment to sola scriptura by emphasizing how the scriptures warrant obedience to kings; 3 moreover, her defense is backed by her husband. When Henry vouches “Gods-Mother Kate , thou toucht them there,” still confident, Katherine continues her critique. Having denounced the authority of the pope, she challenges the authority of some of the central doctrines and rituals of the Roman Catholic faith. She proceeds:
Quee. Pray tell the King then, what Scripture haue yee,
To teach religion in an vnknowne language?
Instruct the ignorant to kneele to Saints,
By bare-foote pilgrimage to visite shrines,
For mony to release from Purgatorie,
The vildest villaine, theefe, or murderer,
All this the people must beleeue you can,
Such is the dregs of Romes religion. (H3r)
Katherine, once again, emphasizes the importance of scriptural precedent (or rather, in this case, the lack thereof). She denounces those who refuse to teach the Bible in the vernacular, and she discredits pilgrimage and prayers to saints as practices that are unfounded and unethical. Her criticism reflects the familiar Protestant polemical interpretation of Catholic ritual and ceremony as consisting of illegitimate man-made practices, which distract believers from the “true” Christian faith. (See Fig. 1)
3 Katherine’s rebuttal, “Yee know the Scripture binds yee to obey him”, could refer, for example, to any number of relevant passages from the Bible: Matthew 6:24, 1 Peter 2:17, or Romans 13:1–6. For a thorough discussion of the late-Henrician debates over the use of scripture as the basis for warranting kings to oversee religious matters, see Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 58–69.
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Katherine seems to have won what appears to be a traditional Protestant/Catholic debate, until Gardiner adds one final caveat:
Gard . I, those are the speeches of those hereticks,
Cranmer , Ridley , and blunt Lattimer ,
That dayly raile against his Hollynesse,
Filling the land with hatefull heresies. (H3r) 4
Astonished at Gardiner’s words, suddenly Katherine turns defensive.
Quee. Nay be not angry, nor mistake them Lords,
What they haue said or done, was mildly followed,
As by their Articles are euident.
King. Where are those Articles Kate ?
Quee. Ile goe and fetch them to your Maiestie,
And pray your Hignesse view them gratiously. (H3r)
Katherine’s exit will prove costly, for it is in her absence that Bonner and Gardiner persuade Henry that her affiliation with Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, and particularly, with their articles of faith, amounts to treason against the state. Fortunately for Katherine, the king will later accept her plea of innocence and subsequently overturn the orders
4 The play’s portrayal of Gardiner and Bonner follows closely other examples found in English Protestant religious polemic throughout the sixteenth century. For the early modern reception and representation of the life of Edmund Bonner, see Gina Alexander, “Bonner and the Marian Persecutions,” The English Reformation Revised , ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 157–175. For a similar discussion of Stephen Gardiner, see Michael Riordan and Alec Ryrie, “Stephen Gardiner and the Making of a Protestant Villain,” SCJ 34.4 (2003): 1039–1063. Rowley’s choice to have Gardiner denounce Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley as ‘heretics’ is not an arbitrary one. All three men— the so-called Oxford Martyrs—were later to be executed for heresy in 1555, during the reign of Mary. Rowley’s first audiences were likely familiar with the execution narratives that were recounted and illustrated in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments . The placement of this well-known 1555 reference in a debate of 1546 provides us with a clue to how Rowley historicizes: as a dramatist he takes great liberty with time, in part to illustrate the similar struggles experienced by evangelicals throughout the various Tudor Reformations. For the fullest discussion of the imprisonment, trial, and execution of Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley see D.M. Loades, The Oxford Martyrs (London: B.T. Batsford, 1970) 168–233.
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FIGURE 1
This illustration, which comes at the conclusion of Foxe’s ecclesiastical history, epitomizes the protestant commitment to sola scriptura . In this woodcut depicting blind justice, which first appeared in the third edition (1576) of the Book of Martyrs , the Bible (illustrated as the Verbum Dei, or Word of God), in the left scale, outweighs the ceremonial objects commonly used in Catholic worship, found in the right scale. As John N. King further explains, Foxe follows “the model of German Lutheran visual propaganda, [as] the barefoot figures of Jesus and the apostles stand opposed to the ostentatiously clad members of the clerical hierarchy of the Church of Rome.” Simply, in this polemical binary, true religion is represented as simple and transparent, whereas falsehood is obscured and deformed. See King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 181. Image from John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1583), STC 11225, 2Y7v. Reproduced by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (call number foxe f 00004, vol. 1).
6 calling for her execution. With the royal couple reunited, the play closes in a spirit of reconciliation and peace. History takes the form of comedy. 5
Despite achieving dramatic closure, the play’s political-religious controversies are left unresolved. Katherine may make amends with her husband, Henry VIII, but only after he has contemplated having her executed for her religious affliations. The queen supports the doctrine of royal supremacy and evokes the right of the state to legislate and enforce religious orthodoxy through proclamation. 6 Why then does she, rather than
Gardiner and Bonner, feel guilt for her religious beliefs? One answer, and perhaps the most obvious, is that Katherine’s evangelical sympathies, made here through her alleged connection to Cranmer’s, Latimer’s, and Ridley’s articles of faith, are what establishes her potential heresy. But if so, then surely Bonner and Gardiner—devotees of the pope— would be subject to the same charge. Perhaps, then, we need to reassess the scene by considering less of what Katherine says or believes, and more of whom she speaks to.
Katherine, Gardiner, and Bonner clearly dispute before their king, but it is Katherine
5 Early modern English history plays are something of a troubled genre. In this period they could take the form of tragedy, comedy, romance, or some combination of these and other genres. In When You See Me , the comic often serves to veil the serious political tensions in the play, thus eliciting a mixed response from audiences. On the complexities of defining history plays see G.K. Hunter, English Drama 1558–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 155–167; for Hunter’s views on comic history in particular, see 230–252. Further relevant discussions include Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer, introduction, English Historical Drama, 1500–1600. Forms Outside the Canon , ed. Grant and Ravelhofer (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) 1–31, and Paulina Kewes, “The Elizabethan History Play: a True Genre?” Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 2. The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) 170–193. For two other discussions that consider the generics of history plays, with particular focus on Shakespeare’s works, see Michael Hattaway, “The Shakespeare History Play,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays , ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 3–24 and Emma Smith, “Genre,” Shakespeare Histories , ed. Emma Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) 34–42. 6 Henry’s proclamation is historical. The 1536 Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome (1536: 28 Henry VIII, c.10; SR , 663–666) forced male subjects to take an oath against the papacy. Those who refused to take the oath—men like John Fisher, and, most famously, Thomas More—were executed. For discussion of the 1536 act, see Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation , 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan-Palgrave, 2006) 14–15. All subsequent citations to the Henrican acts are from volume three of Alexander Luders et al. eds., Statutes of the Realm , 11 vols. (London: Royal Commission, 1810–1828). All subsequent references from the statutes (abbreviated as SR henceforth) are to volume and page number.
7 alone who challenges the ecclesiastical authority of the state. We must not forget that
Gardiner and Bonner are the chief representatives of England’s episcopacy. In 1544 (and in 1604) this central religious body was responsible for legislating England’s ecclesiastical polity. When the scene is understood in these terms, Queen Katherine functions as a subject who challenges the king and his church leadership; her disputation reflects more than a matter of theological preference, because Katherine’s opinions directly challenge England’s post-Reformation political infrastructure.
It is this political aspect of the debate that would have resonated as a topical issue with Rowley’s 1604–1605 audiences, since much of the controversy over religion in early Stuart England focused on the legality of England’s ecclesiology, which was controlled, in large part, by high ranking bishops. Katherine’s position can be read historically as an Henrician episode, but the particulars of her dilemma need also to be interpreted in the Stuart context in which they were dramatized. In 1604, when the play was first performed, the line demarcating the personal from the public in religious matters was feverishly debated, and consequently proved a hotly contested subject for the English state, its church, and its subjects. The first London audiences of When You See Me would have regarded Katherine’s dilemma not only as the unfortunate, sixty-year-old fictionalized predicament of a Tudor queen, but also as a familiar dilemma facing them in the present Stuart age.
Speculation over both the future definition of England’s religion and the official position on religious uniformity was of pressing concern following King James I’s
English accession in 1603. In the first months of the reign, Catholics and Protestants repeatedly petitioned the new Stuart king to modify the Elizabethan settlement and to
8 grant greater toleration for those with dissenting religious beliefs. But non-conformist and
Catholic hopes would go unfulfilled, since James and the episcopacy left the Elizabethan religious settlement largely unaltered. The Hampton Court Conference of January 1604 was a turning point in this regard. During the three-day session, Puritan representatives debated with the king and his bishops over a wide range of issues pertaining to religious belief and practice in a manner reminiscent of Katherine’s in Rowley’s play. In the immediate aftermath of the conference, the episcopacy created new legislation ordering clergy nation-wide to conform to a new set of church articles; 7 these articles were to be enforced by bishops during their annual visitations to the country’s different dioceses. 8
Between 1604—when the campaign started—and 1609, approximately eighty Puritan ministers were suspended for non-conformity. Some ministers lost their licenses while others lost their entire livings. 9 In all such cases, whole congregations temporarily were left without spiritual leadership. 10
Similar measures were taken against English Catholic recusants two years later when, in the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, a new Oath of Allegiance was issued
7 Those articles were published as The Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall (London, 1604) STC 10069.3–10070.7. For a thorough discussion of the Canons and the contemporary reactions to them, see Charles W.A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 65–112. 8 The Articles for London were overseen by Richard Bancroft and were published in 1604 ( STC 10255). For a more comprehensive survey of Stuart Visitation Articles see Kenneth Fincham, ed., Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, 2 vols. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1994). 9 A list of ministers deprived of their benefices for non-conformity 1604–1609 is reprinted as Appendix VI in Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 323– 326. For a more conceptualized discussion see Fincham, “Episcopal Government 1603–1640,” The Early Stuart Church 1603–1642 , ed. Fincham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) 75–78. 10 Evidence suggests, however, that some of the suspensions were spurred by parishioners who complained that the prayer book and other official ceremonies were not being adequately followed. See, for example, the 1604 case against the Manchester curate, Ralph Kilk, as discussed in Judith Maltby, “‘By this Book’: Parishioners, the Prayer Book and the Established Church,” The Early Stuart Church 1603–1642 , ed. Kenneth Fincham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) 118–120.
9 by Parliament to enforce religious conformity. 11 Designed to ensure “loyalty and due obedience,” the oath was added to what was essentially a reinstated set of Elizabethan penal laws. In 1606, any Catholic who refused to attend church services was subjected to monthly fines that increased with each offence; and those who attempted to convert subjects to the Roman Catholic faith could be charged with high treason. 12 The result, as
Michael Questier suggests, “was possibly the most lethal measure against Romish dissent ever to reach the statute book.” 13 This new Oath of Allegiance, along with the Canons of
1604 and other legislation passed 1604–1607, 14 illustrate the extent to which the Stuart church and state attempted to regulate religious belief and practice. Simply then, the debates over religious conformity and toleration, which had been central to the Tudor
Reformations, only intensified in the first years of James’s reign. The first audiences of
When You See Me were more than viewers of a literary rendering of the Tudor past: they were spectators to a historical drama that engaged with the central post-Reformation
11 The Oath of Allegiance was enforced by statute under the title An Act for the Better Discovery and Repressing of Popish Recusants (3 and 4 James I, c.4, 1606); it is reprinted in J.P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) 458–459. For recent assessments of the Oath in both its British and European context see W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 75–123, M. C. Questier, “Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance,” HJ 40 (1999): 311–329, and Johann P. Sommerville, “Papist Political Thought and the Controversy over the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance,” Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’. Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England , ed. Ethan Shagan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) 162–184. 12 Reunion of Christendom , 77. The Stuart penal laws were modeled on earlier 1581 legislation. For discussion, see John J. Larocca, S.J., “Popery and Pounds: The effect of the Jesuit Mission on Penal Legislation,” The Reckoned Expense. Edward Campion and the Early English Jesuits , ed. Thomas M. McCoog S.J. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1996) 262–263. 13 “Loyalty, Religion and State Power” 313, 329. 14 Much of the legislation on religious conformity came in the form of royal proclamations, official legally- binding pronouncements that were read aloud and then printed shortly after. See for example, A Proclamation Concerning Such as Seditiosly Seek Reformation in Church Matters , 24 October 1603 (Larkin and Hughes 30) STC 8336, A Proclamation Commanding all Jesuits, Seminaries, and Other Priests to Depart the Realme by a Day Appointed , 22 Febuary 1604 (Larkin and Hughes 34) STC 8343 and A Proclamation for the Authorizing and Vniformitie of the Booke of Common Prayer to be Used Throughout the Realme , 5 March 1604 (Larkin and Hughes 35) STC 8344.
10 controversies of their own time. This kind of controversy, as we will see, would figure prominently in all the early Stuart drama on the Tudor royals.
Staging Tudor Royalty: Religious Politics in Stuart Historical Drama (1603–
1607) examines the plays and pageantry about the Tudor royals in the context of three major events: the Hampton Court Conference, the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations, and the Gunpowder Plot. Chapter 1 provides an historical overview of the political and legal controversies over religious belief and practice from Henry VIII’s creation of the royal supremacy (1533–1534) through to James’s first years as king (1603–1607). Chapters 2 through 5 comprise four case studies, each of which centres on a play or pageant on the
Tudor past and its relationship to one of the aforementioned events. Samuel Rowley’s
When You See Me, You Know Me (1604) and Thomas Heywood’s If You Knovv Not Me,
You Know No Bodie (Part One) (1604) a dramatization of Elizabeth’s early years as princess, are discussed in light of the puritan campaigns for church reform and religious toleration surrounding the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604. Chapter 4 examines the treatment of the Tudor past in Thomas Dekker’s The Magnificent
Entertainment , a detailed account of James’s royal entry of March 1604. In particular, the focus is on the London-Dutch community’s celebration of Tudor religious and economic commitments to the Protestant Low Countries in light of the early Stuart negotiations for an end to the Anglo-Spanish war. Chapter 5 discusses Thomas Dekker’s VVhore of
Babylon , an allegorical rendering of the later decades of Elizabeth’s reign, as a commentary on the Stuart government’s response to Jesuit insurgency following the
Gunpowder Plot of November 1605. In examining the characterization, action and language of each dramatic work in relation to the three events noted above, these four
11 case studies show how a particular sub-genre of historical drama, produced between 1603 and 1607, engages with the seminal political-religious issues and controversies of its particular cultural moment.
Staging Tudor Royalty thus offers a new context and methodology for examining these particular Stuart plays and pageantry. The primary aim is not to refute previous criticism on these works—which has focused primarily on questions related to genre and sources—but to augment it. 15 My argument rests on two premises: the first pertains to the subject matter of the drama; and the second, to how the drama functions as cultural commentary. Each premise deserves some explanation.
When You See Me was one of a select group of plays to first chronicle the lives of
Tudor royals. That subject was deemed taboo as long as a Tudor monarch reigned, and so it was only after Elizabeth’s death in 1603 that London playgoers witnessed this significant and previously unstaged chapter of English history. For this reason alone the plays deserve to be discussed as a distinct group. But the Stuart plays on the Tudor past are unique in another respect. Unlike the better-known Elizabethan plays on the medieval
15 Previous studies of the Stuart plays on the Tudor royals usually take the form of single chapters or articles, and only a few of these discuss all of the plays discussed in this thesis. The fullest and most important study to date examines the plays as by-products—both formally and ideologically—of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments . See Marsha S. Robinson, Actes and Monuments and the Jacobean History Play (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002). For a similar if less convincing study, see Judith Doolin Spikes, “The Jacobean History Play and the Myth of the Elect Nation,” Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 117–149. Those studies which consider the plays within the larger genre of history plays include Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare , revised edition (London: Methuen Company, 1965) 219–223, 266–287 and Hunter 256–269. Recent specialized studies have examined how individual plays of this genre engage with various topics including early modern childhood, historiography, and nascent liberalism. See respectively, Mark H. Lawhorn, “Taking Pains for the Primer: Age, Patronage and Penal Surrogacy in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me, ” The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150–1650, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS), 2002) 131–150; Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 67–90; and John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 36–55. While many of these studies examine the plays as deeply engaged with Reformation issues, most ignore the topicality of the plays. One important exception is Susan E. Krantz, “Thomas Dekker’s Political Commentary in the Whore of Babylon ,” SEL 35.2 (1995) 271–291.
12 past, these plays engage directly with the monarchs who reigned during the English
Reformation, and to engage with the Reformation in early Stuart London was to confront what remained an ongoing, and ever-present phenomenon. 16 But to assume that early
Stuart audiences would apply the Tudor past to the present brings me to my second premise.
Using or applying the past to comment on present politics, religion and other cultural concerns and issues was pervasive in this period, and evidence of antiquarians, divines, historians, lawyers, and politicians using biblical, classical, Anglo-Saxon,
Medieval and Renaissance history in this way is well documented. 17 That early modern
English writers of poetry, prose fiction and drama regularly adopted this approach to history is also well documented, especially in cases where the historical subject applied directly to a contemporary issue. To suggest that early modern theatregoers went to history plays exclusively in search of political-religious topicality simplifies audience response, but it is logical to assume that some audience members were familiar with applying the past to the present, and therefore often viewed these and other plays
16 This is not to suggest that Elizabethan plays did not engage with the Reformation; indeed, critics, such as Cynthia Susan Clegg and Stephen Greenblatt, have argued compellingly for Shakespeare’s plays as Reformation commentaries. The point is that only Stuart history plays on the Tudor past could stage the Reformation in such explicit terms, because the royalty in these plays lived during the Reformation. 17 On the prevalence of “using” or “applying” history in early modern England, see especially Paulina Kewes, “History and its Uses,” The Uses of History in Early Modern England , ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 2006) 1–30, and William Sherman, Used Books. Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008). Other studies to consider the uses of the English past in this way include D.R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate and their Books 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 187–228, the collection of essays entitled Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England , eds. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 149–196. For a related study that considers the uses of the classical past in early modern European history, see Anthony Grafton, What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
13 accordingly. 18 A series of works dealing explicitly with the politics of Tudor post-
Reformation belief and practice, in an era when those same post-Reformation controversies continued to rage, seems especially well suited for this kind of topical rendering.
The Stuart dramatists writing on the Tudor past, particularly the political-religious controversies of the Henrican, Marian, Edwardian, and Elizabethan Reformations, used the continuities that existed between the Tudor and Stuart periods. The first four years of the Stuart reign were marked by a series of events that allowed for these historical parallels to exist. The king’s accession in 1603 was for many the long-awaited opportunity for a major shift in religious policy. Some Catholics and Puritans celebrated the king as a reformer, often via analogies to the Tudor past; while others cited the Tudor past to expose the central post-Reformation crises of the last seventy years. Two questions in particular characterize that past, and those two questions reside at the heart of the Stuart plays on Tudor royalty: Should the state demand religious uniformity from its subjects, especially when such a demand violates an individual’s personal faith; and, as a corollary, how should a subject respond to a state that insists he contradict his faith?
Only by surveying the nearly seventy years of Tudor Reformation history will we be able to grasp the politics of religious belief and practice present in this early Stuart drama.
18 For a particularly rich reading of political topicality in Shakespeare’s plays, see Donna Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Kentucky: Lexington University Press, 1992).
14
CHAPTER ONE
State Religion and Individual Belief: Post-Reformation Debate from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I
Religious sectarianism in post-Reformation England was complicated, encompassing a more complex set of divisions than the common binary of Protestant versus Catholic allows. As historians and literary scholars increasingly acknowledge, much of the debate over religion from the final decade of Henry VIII’s reign through to the Stuart reigns focused on the state’s demand for outward conformity to an official orthodoxy. This institutionalization of faith often resulted in infighting between like- minded believers. 19 Those Catholics, for example, who attended English church services, and thus conformed outwardly to the demands of the state’s religion as codified under the
Book of Common Prayer during Edward VI’s and Elizabeth I’s reigns, lived in relative peace compared with non-conformist Protestants. The reason for the state’s actions was largely political, for while these Protestants may have sympathized with the Stuart state’s theological position (i.e. its doctrine), they remained openly critical of the authority of the state’s episcopal leadership (i.e. its governance) and the liturgy (i.e. its discipline) that these church leaders defined, administered and often legislated. 20 Consequently, these non-conformists were often punished, fined, or imprisoned not because of their beliefs
19 For discussions of the Tudor state’s attempts at achieving religious uniformity and the responses to that legislation from both conformist and non-conformist Catholics and Protestants see, for instance, Michael C. Questier, Catholics and Catholicism in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hymen, 1988), and Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred, Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 20 English Catholics who attended church in Elizabeth’s reign were often labeled ‘Church Papists’ by their adversaries. The derogatory label came from the belief that outward conformity to the English sovereign veiled a secret obedience to the pope. See Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (1993; Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999).
15 per se , but because of their publicized dissent. From Henry VIII’s formation of the Royal
Supremacy in 1533–1534 through to Elizabeth’s death in 1603, English subjects would routinely struggle with the politics governing religious belief and practice. Before we turn to examine the dramatic texts on the Tudor royals, an outline of this seventy-year struggle is essential.
a) Henry VIII
The Reformation statutes enacted after Henry VIII’s separation from the Roman
Catholic Church in 1533 proved to be pivotal in re-defining England’s relationship between church and state. As Ethan Shagan explains:
For centuries, two governments, one royal and one ecclesiastical, had laid
their overlapping claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty across the English
polity. Two court systems had settled disputes, two tax systems had
demanded revenues, and two rudimentary bureaucracies had maintained
order. Now in a remarkable coup d’état the head of the Church
government was overthrown, his legal authority eliminated, his political
power outlawed, and his subordinates brought under the jurisdiction of the
king of England. 21
While the full implications of Henry’s revolutionary schism and subsequent reformation, to church doctrine, discipline, and governance, were only to be fully comprehended in the decades following 1533, its initial impact was immediate and wide-ranging: expressed in new legislation that defined England’s status as a nation, defended in the many government-endorsed printed pamphlets published in London at this time, and even
21 Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 29.
16 visualized on the elaborate title-pages used for the first printed vernacular Bibles (see Fig.
2). Henry’s break from Rome amounted to a complete re-envisioning of English political- religious identity.
That new vision was initially codified through a series of acts that had been devised largely by Henry’s vicegerent-in-spirituals, Thomas Cromwell, and passed shortly thereafter in Parliament during sessions held between 1533 and 1536. 22 Two of the acts are especially noteworthy, since they provided a new definition for both the status of the king and for the country. The first, the Act in Restraint of Appeals , to use its more familiar modern name, emphasizes England’s autonomy: “Where by dyvers sundrie olde authentike histories and cronicles it is manifestly declared and expssed that this
Realm of Englond is an Impire, and so hath ben accepted in the worlde.” Having established a historical precedent for England’s imperial status, albeit based loosely on unnamed histories, the Act proceeds to define the English king as ruler of England’s civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions:
govned by oon supme heede and King having the Dignitie and Roiall
Estate of the Imperiall Crowne of the same, unto whome a Body politike,
compacte of all sortes and degrees of people devided in termes and by
names of Spualtie and Temporalie, ben bounden and owen to bere nexte to
God a naturall and humble obedience… in all causes maters debates and
contencions happenyng to occurr, insurge or begyne within the limittes
22 Richard Rex’s study of these acts has drawn attention to the significant changes in the vocabulary used in the state’s legislature preceding and following Henry’s break from Rome. References to ‘the Pope’s Holiness’ in 1531–1532, are replaced by ‘The See of Rome’ and the ‘Bishop of Rome’ in 1533–1534. See “The Crisis of Obedience: God’s Word and Henry’s Reformation,” HJ 39.4 (1996): 879–880.
17
thereof without restraynt or pvocation to any foreygn Princes or Potentates
of the World. (1533: 24 Henry VIII, c.12.) 23
FIGURE 2
In this famous image taken from the title-page of The Byble in Englyshe (London, 1539) STC 2068, Henry distributes the scriptures to his ecclesiastical ministers, Cranmer and Cromwell. The gesture is a reminder that under the new Royal Supremacy the king replaces the pope as overseer of religion in England. Reproduced by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (call number: stc f 0008 ).
The Act makes a powerful assertion, for not only does it contradict the Catholic Church’s, and particularly the pope’s, long-standing claim over ecclesiastical affairs in England, it implies that this foreign control over English affairs has always been fraudulent. Indeed, the remainder of the Act repeatedly insists upon the self-sufficiency of “the Spualitie now
23 SR , 3: 427. All quotations are taken from the nineteenth-century edition of the Statutes of the Realm with its selective modernization of “u” and “v” and its refusal to expand abbreviations. Volume and pages are given. For further details see my section on abbreviations.
18 beyng usually called the Englishe Churche” as it briefly recounts the negative consequences of England’s dependence on Rome. 24 While the Act in Restraint of Appeals is ideologically driven, much of its defense is bureaucratic in nature. Involvement with
Rome is argued to be counter-productive to England’s political, economic, and social vitality.
The Act of Supremacy , to use its modern title, is similar to the Act in Restraint of
Appeals , except that its focus is on defining the English monarch’s powers over the church:
Be it enacted by auctoritie of this Psent Parliament that the Kyng our
sovaign Lorde, his heires and successours Kynges of this Realme, shallbe
takyn acceptyd & reputed the onely supreme heed in the erthe of the
Churche of England callyd Anglicana Ecclesia , and shall have and enjoye
annexed and unyted to the Ymperyall Crowne of this Realm aswell the
title and style thereof, as all Honours, Dignyties, phemyences, jurisdicions,
privileges, auctorities, ymunyties, profitis and comodities, to the said
dignytie of supreme heed of the same Churche belongyng and
appertaynyng. (1534: 26 Henry VIII, c.1.) 25
These acts, which have been typically grouped under the rubric The Royal Supremacy, provided the political and legal means for England to end its millennium-long partnership with Rome. By transferring the ecclesiastical powers previously held by the pope to
England’s king, these acts paved the way for the creation of future statutes outlawing the
24 For example, the Act proceeds to note how “appeales sued oute of this Realme to the See of Rome, in causes testamentarie, causes of matrimony and dyvorces, right of tithes, oblacions and obvencions . . . to the greate inquietacion, vexacion, trouble, costes and charges of the Kinges Highnesse and many of his Subjectes . . . in this his Realme.” Statutes of the Realm , 3: 427 25 SR , 3: 492.
19 authority of the papacy, while providing a precedent for the crown to sell England’s religious houses and dissolve its monasteries. 26 The creation of the Royal Supremacy would profoundly alter England’s cultural identity.
But the transfer of powers from pope to king did not initially mean an end to the
English Catholic faith, and a major reason for this was the king’s own desire to maintain traditional forms of worship. Despite the government’s reformist policies, and despite its denouncement of the pope’s authority, Henry would defend many of the traditional tenets of Catholic theology. In its entirety, then, the Henrician Reformation did not satisfy evangelicals sympathetic to Luther and other continental reformers; nor did it suit traditionalists who remained committed to the doctrines of the pre-Reformation church. If
Katherine Parr’s dilemma in When You See Me is confusing, it is, in part, because the queen Rowley portrays lived during a period of confused religious policy.
But the Henrican Reformation became confusing over time. Between 1533 and
1538 the English Crown seemed to be advocating a full-scale European-style reformation. All that changed with the 1539 Act Abolishing Divsity in Opynions . This
Act of Six Articles , to use its popular sixteenth-century title, included a six-part statement on religious belief and practice. Conservative and controversial, the Act staunchly defended certain key doctrines of Roman Catholicism, including the traditional understanding of the Eucharist:
that in the most blessed Sacrament of the Aulter, by the strenghe and
efficacy of Christe myghtie worde, it beinge spoken by the prest, is psent
really, under the forme of bread and wyne, the naturall bodye and bloode
26 See, for instance, An Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome (1536: 28 Henry VIII, c.10; SR , 3: 663–666) and An Act for Dissolution of Abbeys (1539: 31 Henry VIII, c.13; SR , 3, 733–739).
20
of our Saviour Jesu Christe … and it is to be beleved and not doubted of,
but that in the fleshe under forme of bread is the verie blode, and withe the
blode under form of wyne is the verie fleshe, as well aparte as thoughe
they were both together. (1539: 31 Henry VIII, c.14.) 27
The Government’s abrupt shift to a more traditionalist agenda in 1539 must have been surprising to evangelicals after four years of reforms. But what would prove even more surprising—and what made this act so lethal—were its legal implications. The first article in the 1539 Act , for instance, states: “Any who after 12 July 1539 in word, writing or printing ‘publish, preach, teach, say, affirm, declare, dispute, argue or hold’ contrary to the first article, as well as their supporters, shall be guilty of heresy and burned;” similarly, the sixth article warns, “Persons refusing to confess or receive the sacrament at the normal times shall be fined and imprisoned by the Council; a second offence to be felony”(739). English subjects who failed to accept the government’s demands, as outlined within The Act of Six Articles , were seen as exercising more than religious difference, more than heresy. They were guilty of treason.
To study the Henrican statutes is to be reminded of the intensely political and legal nature of the English Reformation. Subsequent acts demanding uniformity in religion would surface throughout the remainder of the king’s reign. The 1543 Acte for
Thadvancement of True Religion… (34–5 Henry VIII, c. 1), 28 for instance, placed strict limitations on lay access to the Bible, while The King’s Book , an extended statement on theology, composed in the same year, condemned the Protestant salvo of “justification by
27 SR , 3: 739. 28 SR, 3: 894–899.
21 faith alone.” Having defended evangelicalism in the mid-1530s, Henry turned staunchly tradaitionalist in his theology in the 1540s. 29 As Peter Marshall summarizes:
Henry’s own beliefs have challenged historians, just as they must
sometimes have baffled his contemporaries. Arch conservative on some
issues (the mass, clerical celibacy, justification by faith), he could be
surprisingly radical on others (monasticism, religious imagery, purgatory,
vernacular Scripture). 30
Despite its idiosyncratic and heterodox character, however, the Henrican Reformation was consistent in defining religious observance as a form of political duty. 31 “For mighty and humble alike, behaviour in religious observance became a matter of obedience or disobedience, of acquiescence or subversion, of attempts to advance (or accelerate) the official agenda, to inhibit or redirect it.” 32 In short, the Henrician Reformation made personal faith political.
Initial responses to Henry’s royal supremacy varied considerably. 33 Many evangelicals—including those who held reservations over placing such religious powers within the hands of a single individual—embraced the Acts of 1534–1538 because they
29 For a thorough discussion of the late Henrician acts see G.W. Bernard, “The Making of Religious Policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the Search for The Middle Way,” HJ 41.2 (1998): 321–349. 30 Marshall illustrates the government’s confused religious stance in this period by citing how “in July 1540 three ‘papists’ and three ‘heretics’ were executed together at Smithfield.” Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 12–13. 31 The tendency to label this period as idiosyncratic is dictated by hindsight, especially since we tend to read the Henrician Reformation in light of the more consistent religious policies of the reigns of Edward, Mary, Elizabeth and James. But Henry’s Reformation in fact resembles similar examples found on the continent at the time, particularly in Sweden and the province of Brandenburg. For discussion of Henry’s Reformation in a larger European context, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Putting the English Reformation on the Map,” The Prothero Lecture 7 July 2004, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 15 (2005): 75– 95. 32 Marshall 5. 33 For the fullest recent discussion, see Daniel Eppley, Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God’s Will in Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 1–61.
22 were the culmination of Henry’s break from Rome. 34 But some contemporaries were reluctant to praise the king’s divine-like status. One of the chief complaints voiced by evangelicals was that the Henrican church too closely resembled the papacy it sought to replace. William Turner was adamant that no earthly man, be he pope or king, could be
“head” of God’s church; for Henry Brinklow and George Joye, Henry’s supremacy failed because it continued to embrace pre-exisiting Roman Catholic rites and ceremonies. 35
The majority of these complaints against the supremacy were published in the safety of exile: in Bonn, Emden, and other European publishing centres. Those who addressed the subject in England were much more careful in their handling of it, as they understood such critiques could be classified as treason, and the consequences of a charge of treason was fine, imprisonment, or death. Men like Morison and Thomas Becon, who praised the supremacy, wrote from London, while others like John Bale and George Joye, who were often overtly critical of the new political-religious establishment, wrote from abroad.
A similar mixed response to the Supremacy can be found in the publications of those Englishmen with Roman Catholic sympathies, including Stephen Gardiner (in
England) and Reginald Pole (abroad). Despite his Roman Catholic beliefs, Gardiner,
Bishop of Winchester, supported the king’s break from Rome. His de vera obedientia (Of
34 The evangelical Richard Morison is typical. In his An Exhortation to Styre all Englyshemen to the Defence of Theyr Countreye ([London], 1539) STC 18110, he proclaims: “Henry the VIII is the Lyon, the wyrde ordeyned and sente by god, to tosse this wicked tyrannte of Rome, to blow him out of al christen regions! Se ye not, to what honour god calleth our nation? May not we rejoice, that god hath chosen our kyng, to worke so noble a feate?” (D7r– D8v). Morison would note elsewhere, “All men witin the reache and dominion of a prince, are by goddis worde commaunded to be obeysant [obedient] to his hesty and pleasure” (A3r). In the words of men like Morison, obedience to kings is a product of God’s will, and the supremacy, an apotheosis. 35 For discussion of Turner’s, Morison’s, Henry Brinklow’s, and George Joye’s works, see Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII 60–66 and E. Karl Gunther and Ethan H. Shagan, “Protestant Radicalism and Political Thought in the Reign of Henry VIII,” P&P 194 (Feb. 2007): 35–74. Many of the discussions of Christian obedience produced by Henrician divines were indebted to William Tyndale’s classic The Obedience of a Christien Man ([Antwerp], 1528). Tyndale’s work was pivotal in drawing attention to the double allegiance owed to God and king, and particularly to the challenges facing Christian subjects living in polities governed by monarchs who instituted heretical religious beliefs and practices.
23
True Obedience ) remains the most famous contemporary statement in favour of the
Supremacy. In contrast, the English-born Cardinal Pole was adamant in his criticism of the Supremacy and scathing in his critique of the king’s character and behaviour in his
1536 pro ecclesiasticae vnitatis ( Defense of the Unity of the Church ). 36
Henrician conformist and reformist arguments provided an important precedent for future Tudor-Stuart debates, dialogues and polemics on the Supremacy, and this kind of rhetoric was to figure prominently in the London Stuart drama on the Tudor past.
b) Edward VI
The Royal Supremacy did not end with Henry. Legislation adopted in subsequent
Tudor reigns continued to support the monarch’s right to govern a single state religion, as can be seen in the first and second Acts of Uniformity (2 and 3 Edward VI, c.1; 5 and 6
Edward VI, c.1), the subsequent issuing of the two versions of The Book of Common
Prayer (1549; 1552), the acts repealing the Henrician statutes under Mary (1554: 1 and 2
Philip and Mary, c.8), and the Acts of Supremacy (1559: 1 Elizabeth I, c.1) and
Uniformity (1559: 1 Elizabeth I, c.2). By the end of 1604, the Stuart government would oversee yet another set of official acts and documents on religious uniformity, all of which would culminate in the publication of The Constitutions and Canons
Ecclesiastical . Rowley’s When You See Me and other Stuart plays on the Tudor royals were first performed at this time in London playhouses. In both venues, memories of the
Edwardian Reformation were recited. But what exactly was the Edwardian Reformation, and why was it significant to the Stuarts?
36 In other words, any study of the reception of the royal supremacy requires that we give equal attention to the religious affiliation of the writer as well as to the place in which that writer’s work was published. For discussion of Gardiner’s and especially Pole’s work, see Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics 36–47.
24
As already noted, the Henrician Reformation oscillated between a traditionalist and an evangelical agenda during the 1530s and 1540s, and even at his death the king who had denied the existence of purgatory and outlawed the worship of images staunchly upheld key Catholic ceremonies and beliefs. His will provides a fitting case in point for it stipulated that there be masses for his soul and annual obits to be performed after his death. 37 And yet, before his death in 1547, Henry ensured that his son Edward, successor and heir to the English throne, was surrounded by men with evangelical religious beliefs.
Henry’s Privy Council included Edward Seymour, the man who was to be Lord Protector over the nine-year old king; John Dudley, Thomas Cranmer, and William Paget were some of the other high-ranking politicians and churchmen nearest the king at his death; while John Cheke and Richard Cox served as schoolmasters to the young prince. In other words, while Henry remained inconsistent in his religious commitments throughout the
1540s, he still took measures to ensure that his heir had evangelical advisors. 38 Exactly why Henry created this evangelical network is uncertain, but what is clear is that his decision had important repercussions for shaping England’s future Protestant identity.
The Edwardian Reformation would flourish under this network. Many of the first
Edwardian reforms resembled those implemented by Henry’s government between 1533 and 1538, although the Edwardian Reformation was even more extreme. The dissolution of monasteries and chantries carried out under Somerset’s watch resembled the iconoclastic legislation carried out during the middle years of Henry VIII’s reign. By the fall of 1547, new visitation injunctions called for the removal of all images on stained
37 Henry’s will is reproduced in the Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII , 22 vols., ed. J.S. Brewer et al. (London: Longmans, 1862–1932) 22.2, no 634, and is discussed in David Loades, Henry VIII: Court, Church and Conflict (Kew, Richmond Surrey: The National Archives, 2007) 207–214. 38 For discussion of Henry’s creation of an evangelical establishment, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 1–56.
25 glass windows; the burning of candles and use of rood screens were also designated
“idolatrous,” and these objects subsequently were removed or destroyed; Corpus Christi processionals and relics were outlawed and destroyed in public bonfires. Perhaps most remarkable, though, is that this Edwardian “Reformation” was largely in place within a year of the start of the new reign. 39
These highly destructive measures against traditional aspects of Catholic worship were to continue over the next five years of the reign, to the horror of many of England’s subjects. 40 As the foundations of Roman Catholic belief and practice were stripped away from English worship, new continental, Reformation-inspired religious practices were implemented. 1548 saw the printing of the official church Homilies with its endorsement of the Protestant doctrine of sola fide , or justification by faith; 1549 witnessed the first edition of the highly popular metrical Psalms compiled by Thomas Sternhold; and in
1549 the first Edwardian Book of Common Prayer was published (a second, more radical version was produced in 1552). Over six short years the central components of the
English Edwardian liturgy were forged, and those components were to remain a central part of worship in the Elizabethan and Stuart churches. 41
39 MacCulloch, Boy King 70–71. 40 For the now classic revisionist accounts of the Henrician and Edwardian “assault” on traditional religion, and the reluctance of subjects to accept the Reformation, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Both studies are representative of recent reappraisals in English Reformation history. For an overview of the key twentieth-century shifts in Reformation historiography, see Patrick Collinson, “The English Reformation 1945–1995,” Routledge Companion to Historiography , ed. Michael Beatley (London: Routledge,1997) 336–360. 41 For a detailed discussion of the influence of the psalms on Tudor and Stuart society see Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For discussion of the influence of the Book of Common Prayer , see Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001) and Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
26
This new liturgy was rigorously enforced during Edward’s reign, so that even the most high-ranking officials who denounced or critiqued it—men like Stephen Gardiner and Edward Bonner—were imprisoned. 42 Indeed, the Edwardian Reformation was draconian in its enforcement of religious policy; however, not all who disagreed with the state religion faced the same treatment. Foreign evangelical refugees were granted freedom to practice a liturgy separate from that of the English church. Indeed, the
London-Dutch community’s pageantry for Edward at James’s royal entry in 1604
(discussed in Chapter 4) celebrates the religious tolerance granted by the Edwardian government to the first Anglo-Dutch immigrants. 43 Seen from one perspective,
Edwardian religious policy was authoritative and uncompromising since those with
Catholic sympathies were forced to recant, worship in secrecy, or seek exile. Seen from another perspective, however, the Edwardian Reformation was open-minded and tolerant, especially in its acceptance of the different branches of international Protestantism. 44
c) Mary
Edward’s death in 1553 brought an end to England’s evangelical church. As he lay dying, the young king attempted to alter the line of succession and have the Protestant
Lady Jane Grey succeed in place of his half-sister Mary; but his efforts were ultimately
42 MacCulloch, Boy King 69. 43 In 1550 the so-called ‘Stranger” (i.e. alien Dutch, French, and Walloon) churches were founded in London. Under a new charter, one of those churches, the Dutch church in Austin Friars, was granted autonomy from the English church. Fifty years later, in 1604, the Dutch church at Austin-Friars still flourished, although its freedom to practice its own liturgy had long been revoked. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Boy King 12–13, 65–66, 89–91, and Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603–1642 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989) 10. The origin of Austin Friars as a ‘Reformed’ church is discussed in Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 34–40. 44 MacCulloch, Boy King 79.
27 crushed and the result was a return to the English Catholicism of the pre-1530s. 45 That
Mary decided to restore Catholicism is not surprising, as she had remained outspoken in her devotion to the Roman faith during Edward’s reign. Despite the 1549 Edwardian Act of Uniformity she and her household continued to observe the Catholic rituals of Matins,
Mass and Evensong. 46 What is surprising, however, is how quickly the Marian government restored English Catholicism. As Eamon Duffy and David Loades contend,
“Given its radical (and, in much of England, unpopular) nature, the Edwardian achievement was remarkable; but Mary overturned it in a matter of weeks.” 47 That a paradigmatic shift in religious policy could happen so quickly, and with minimal opposition, forces us to re-think popular feelings towards the pre-Reformation English church.
Hindsight has often led modern historians to interpret the short reign of Mary
(1553–1558) as an aberration: a temporary setback to the inevitable formation of a
Protestant England. Such an interpretation is misleading, especially because those living in Mary’s reign could not predict their new queen’s premature death and failure to produce an heir. 48 For most English subjects living during Mary’s reign, all signs pointed to England’s return to the Catholic faith. How was Mary able to restore England to
Catholicism after six years of Edwardian evangelicalism?
45 Edward’s draft of “My deuise for the succession,” now housed in the Inner Temple, is examined by Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 71–73, and is reproduced in MacCulloch, Boy King 40. 46 For a thorough discussion of the “oppositional” character of Mary’s household and her larger Catholic network, see Anna Whitelock and Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Princess Mary’s Household and the Succession Crisis, July 1553,” HJ 50.2 (2007): 271–272. 47 Eamon Duffy and David Loades, introduction, The Church of Mary Tudor (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2006) xiv. 48 For a good discussion of the faults of the traditional, Whiggish narrative of the inevitability of Protestantism, and the recent revisions to that narrative, see Peter Marshall and Alex Ryrie, “Introduction: Protestantisms and their Beginnings,” The Beginnings of English Protestantism , eds. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 1–13.
28
Some subjects must have conformed out of fear. Since Mary’s government reinstated laws punishing heresy with death, the most committed evangelicals were left with only two options: exile or martyrdom. While Gardiner may have been imprisoned during Edward’s reign for his religious convictions, Cranmer and three hundred other dissidents were executed for refusing to recant their beliefs before the Marian authorities. 49 A second and less obvious reason for the acceptance of Marian Catholicism was that it resembled the more traditionalist side of Henry VIII’s church. As Lucy
Wooding contends, the Marian church differed in principle from continental Catholicism, and from the Catholicism later to be embraced by recusants in Elizabeth’s reign. Not all of the Edwardian reforms were abandoned upon Mary’s accession: some of the Protestant
Prayers were included in Marian primers, while the existing Edwardian Homilies were followed closely. Coming from Edward’s reign to Mary’s, we will find, as church historians regularly contend, division and difference; but if we look closely we will also find evidence of continuity. Viewed this way, the Marian church was not entirely different from the Edwardian. 50 Finally, in the 1550s there remained a sizeable population of Catholics in England who had conformed unwillingly to Henry’s and
Edward’s “new” religion. For these subjects, Mary’s reinstatement of Catholicism was a restorative act. In considering the initial success of Marian Catholicism, we must acknowledge that its success depended on both the policies implemented by the state and
(even if to a lesser extent) the willingness of England’s subjects to accept those policies.
49 See David Loades, “The Personal Religion of Mary I,” The Church of Mary Tudor , eds. Eamon Duffy and David Loades (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2006) 28. 50 Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) 1–15, 112–122.
29
Of course, not all English subjects were ready to accept the new religious settlement. Those English evangelicals who refused to make the ultimate sacrifice joined fellow Protestants in Europe: in Frankfurt, in Strasbourg, and especially in Emden. They included a good number of England’s university graduates, men who would later hold high-ranking positions in the Elizabethan years. 51 While in exile, these men published treatises and polemics advocating resistance against what they regarded as Mary’s tyrannical regime. One of the most famous of these treatises was John Ponet’s A Shorte
Treatise of Politke Pouuer , published at Strasbourg in 1556. 52 It was also at Strasbourg that John Foxe began compiling material later used for his famous Book of Martyrs .53
These writings remind us of the sizeable dissatisfied English community living in exile during Mary’s reign. Any assessment of the “success” of Marian England must also account for the dissatisfied, imprisoned and exiled, especially as many of these men and women were to play a major role in the shaping of future Elizabethan political-religious policy.
Still, many Protestant sympathizers had chosen to remain in England, and many of them survived during Mary’s reign. William Cecil was one of the more prominent of these figures; but the most famous Protestant to survive the reign was Elizabeth. Her story of survival, made famous by John Foxe, was to serve as the central narrative for
Thomas Heywood’s early Stuart play If You Knovv Not Me (1604–1605), which I discuss in Chapter Two. When that play was first staged c. 1604–1605, in the wake of the
51 Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism : Six Studies (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) 10–38, 55–85. 52 STC 20178. 53 Both the Commentarij rerum in ecclesia gestarum (Strasbourg, 1554), and the Rerum in ecclesia gestarum (Zurich, 1559) were printed during Foxe’s years in exile. These Latin, Protestant martyrologies, produced for a larger European market, would provide the blueprints for Foxe’s famous Actes and Monuments . For discussion, see John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 73–77.
30
Hampton Court Conference, the subject of religious conformity was especially controversial. As I argue, to stage the play in this political climate was to invite audiences to consider the applicability of the recent Tudor past to recent events of early Stuart
London.
d) Elizabeth I
After five years of rule, Mary Tudor died. With her death came the end of a newly restored English Catholic Church, since her successor, her half-sister Elizabeth, made
Protestantism the national religion. Many living in England during the turbulent decade stretching from 1550 to 1560 would have found the abrupt shifts in religious policy troubling. The evangelicalism of the Edwardian church gave way to a Catholic church under Mary, only to be replaced by a Protestant church under Elizabeth. English subjects living in late 1558 must have wondered how much change the new reign would bring, and how tolerant her religious policies would be. The answers were to come quickly.
The Elizabethan religious settlement reached between 1559 and 1563 was proof that the new queen and her politicians were committed to endorsing the tenets of the
Protestant Reformation. The Act of Uniformity and Succession (1559), the Thirty-Nine
Articles (1563), and the re-installation of the Book of Common Prayer (1559) were just three notable, early indicators of a paradigmatic shift from previous Marian religious policy. 54 While these legislative measures marked a fresh beginning for the reign, they were also part of a restoration, since many of the first Elizabethan statutes and laws resembled pre-existing ones produced during the new queen’s father’s and half-brother’s
54 For a more detailed discussion of the implications of this religious policy, see John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 290–293, 303.
31 reigns. For instance, the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity endorsed the Henrican Royal
Supremacy by acknowledging that monarchs were responsible for overseeing the country’s ecclesiastical affairs; similarly, the 1559 Book of Common Prayer was modeled closely on the second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552. 55 Viewed in this context, the
Elizabethan Settlement formed a continuation to two earlier Tudor Reformations; however, what distinguishes Elizabethan religious policy is its longevity, for it remained largely unaltered from its inception in 1559 until the queen’s death in 1603.
For this policy to survive for forty-five years required consistent and often aggressive political enforcement since in Elizabethan England both Catholics and
Protestants regularly critiqued the new religious settlement. Some went so far as to label the queen the head of an ungodly ecclesiastical polity. Such criticism of the state religion regularly came in the form of printed polemics authored by deprived English divines living in exile and produced either at continental presses, or by unauthorized presses in
England. These printed critiques provide an excellent source for measuring the rhetoric of religious debate employed throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. 56
The first significant polemical exchange over religion in Elizabeth’s reign was waged between Elizabeth’s bishops, the primary representatives of the English church, and English Catholic divines, particularly men who had held prominent positions in
55 The most notable difference between the 1552 and 1559 editions of the Book of Common Prayer was the inclusion of the Act of Uniformity in the later version. For a fuller discussion of the particulars of the two prayer books see David N. Griffiths, ed., The Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer 1549–1999 (London: British Library, 2002) 62–63, 69. 56 Religious literature (controversies and polemics being but one component of a larger corpus of kinds and genres) remained the central component of the English booktrade from the 1560s through to the late seventeenth century. On the taxonomies of religious publication in this period, see Patrick Collinson, Arnold Hunt and Alexandra Walsham, “Religious Publishing in England 1557–1640,” The Cambridge History of The Book in Britain Vol IV , eds. John Bernard and D.F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 29–66, and Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
32 government, at the universities, or in the church during Mary’s reign. By the early 1560s, many highly educated Catholics had been stripped of their offices as a result of their public opposition to the state’s religion. Subsequently they sought exile. As Lucy
Wooding observes, “with notable dispatch, the intellectual establishment of Catholic
England relocated to Louvain, and there began to come to terms with a series of new and unsettling realities, as it took on the matters of a church in exile.” 57 One of the more outspoken of those English Catholic exiles was Thomas Harding. His printed polemical exchange with John Jewel presents us with a microcosm of the religious divisiveness that characterized the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, as well as an important source for interpreting the dialogues and debates found in the Stuart drama on the Tudor past.
Less than a year after Elizabeth succeeded to the English throne, John Jewel, the newly appointed Bishop of Salisbury, ignited what would prove to be the most enduring political-religious controversy of the queen’s reign. The so-called Great Controversy began as a sermon that Jewel delivered at Paul’s Cross on 26 November 1559; it was to be delivered twice again in the following year, first at Paul’s Cross on the 17 March, and then again at court on the 31 March. In that sermon Jewel outlined what he believed to be twenty-seven fradulent Roman Catholic articles of faith, including, for example, prayer in
Latin and transubstantiation. The now famous challenge, which was regularly reprinted in subsequent works by Jewel, reads:
If any learned man of all our aduersaries, or if al the learned men that be
aliue, behable to bryng any one sufficient sentence out of any old catholic
doctor, or father, or out of any olde Catholic Doctour, or father, or out of
57 Rethinking Catholicism 181. Louvain (near Brussels) and Douai (in France) were the two major centres for English Catholic printing in these years.
33
any olde Councel out of the holy Scriptures of God, or any one example of
the Primitiue Churche, whereby it may be clearely and plainly be
proued… I am content to yelde, and to subscribe. (A1r) 58
Jewel’s Sermon was published in London in 1560 ( STC 14612–14613). 59 This and subsequent works by Jewel were supported by (in certain cases written at the behest of) the two highest ranking Elizabethan officials: the Secretary of State, William Cecil, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. 60 One of the most important early respondents to Jewel’s writings was Thomas Harding, an Oxford-educated Protestant sympathizer who later converted to Catholicism. Shortly into Elizabeth’s reign, Harding sought exile in Louvain, and there wrote a series of challenges to Jewel’s works, the first of which was An Ansvvere to Maister Iuelles Challenge (Louvain, 1564) STC 12758, and the next, A Confutation of a Booke intitled an apologie of the Church of England
(Antwerp, 1565) STC 12762. 61 Between 1560 and 1571, Jewel challenged Harding and other opponents by producing a series of published works devoted to the defense of the
Elizabethan settlement, works that would prove highly influential for decades to come. 62
58 This version of the challenge appears in Jewel’s A Replie Vnto M. Hardinges Ansvvere (London, 1566) STC 14607. 59 It was quickly answered by the Catholic sympathizer, and Dean of St. Paul’s, Henry Cole. In 1562, Jewel continued his defense of the Church of England by writing the apologia ecclesiae anglicanae , a work that was published anonymously in 1562 ( STC 14581), and soon thereafter translated by Anne Bacon, mother of Francis Bacon, as An Apologie or Answere in Defence of the Churche of Englande (London, 1564) STC 14590–14591. 60 John Craig, “John Jewel” ODNB . For the most up-to-date discussion of the nature, reception and legacy of Jewel’s various works, see Gary W. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church: The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 51–114. 61 Jewel would respond with his A Replie Vnto M. Hardinges Ansvvere (London, 1566) STC 14606–14607 and A Defence of an Apology (1567; rev. 1571) STC 14600–14602. While Harding remained Jewel’s chief opponent in the controversy there were other Catholic émigrés (including Thomas Stapleton, John Rastell, and Nicholas Sander) who joined Harding in the attack on Jewel. For discussion of Harding’s work in a larger context of English recusant literature, see Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism 185–222 and Jenkins, John Jewel 115–151. 62 Many of Jewel’s works were to be reprinted in the 1570s through to the 1590s. His complete works were published in folio in 1608.
34
Significantly, what had started for Jewel as a Paul’s Cross sermon, ended, eleven years later, as one of the most famous and lengthy battles of books. 63
Much of the Jewel-Harding debate engaged with the merits of different kinds of authority: scriptural, ecclesiastical and political. The section labeled “Of The
Supremacie” from the 1565 Replie is typical. Here, Jewel begins by citing Harding’s defense of the pope’s claim over the universal church; he then counters his opponent by declaring there to be no definitive scriptural proof, in either the Bible or the writings of the Church Fathers, to support the idea that “any suche Superioritie, or Universal power was geuen by Christe to the See of Rome” (T5r) 64 ; he then declares his opponent’s positions to be false. Much of Jewel’s critique in this section, and throughout his works, centres on what he deems to be Harding’s misuse and misinterpretation of patristic sources. 65 Indeed, Jewel not only dismantles Harding’s arguments; he also often directs
Harding to more authoritative editions of various works he has chosen to cite. While
Jewel establishes and defends the Elizabethan church settlement, he more often places the burden on his opponent, asking him to present historical precedent for specific doctrines,
63 Jenkins has shown that more than three quarters of all of Jewel’s writings were devoted to Harding ( John Jewel , 59). “The Great Controversy” amounted to sixty-four published works. For surveys of the printed output, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age. A Survey of Printed Sources (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1977) 1–6; A.C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose 1559–1582 (London: Sands, 1950) 60–66; and for interpretations of the controversy, Patrick Collinson, “Literature and the Church,” The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, eds. David Lowenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 385–387, and F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (1967; Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004) 105–110. 64 A Replie Vnto M. Hardinges Ansvvere (London, 1566) STC 14606. Most of these debates were written by and designed for England’s intellectuals according to a familiar scholastic framework comprised of points and counterpoints or propositions and refutations, a mode defined as animadversion in the period. For discussion of this scholastic style, see J. Andreas Lowe, Richard Smyth and the Language of Orthodoxy. Re-Imagining Tudor Catholic Polemicism (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003) 9–11, 151–154. 65 For example, in his preface Vnto the Christian Reader , in the 1566 Replie , Jewel explains: [T]hou shalt soone see the Ancient Fathers, Some that neuer were, by M. Hardinge furnised, and counterfeited: Some vntruely alleged: Some corruptely translated: Some peruersely expounded: Some vnaptly and guilefully applied: Their woordes sometimes abridged: Sometimes enlarged: Sometimes altered: Sometimes dissembled: Fabulous and vnknowen Authorities newly founded. Childish Argumentes fondly concluded: To be shorte, infinite Vntruthes and knowen Vntrouthes boldely auouched. [¶ 2]v
35 ceremonies and/or articles of faith. 66 In this regard, Jewel’s strategy resembles that used by Rowley’s Katherine, particularly her question to Gardiner, “What scripture have yee to teach religion in an vnknown language?” Works such as the 1566 Defence provided readers with a familiar polemic, as well as a standard rhetorical strategy that was thereafter adopted by subsequent proponents and opponents alike, of English religious policy.
The larger implications of the Jewel-Harding debate is of importance to this thesis, particularly since it engages with the legitimacy of the English church, the rights of kings to oversee ecclesiastical matters, and the duty of subjects to adhere to the religious laws of the state. As Cyndia Susan Clegg correctly asserts, “while theological debate lay at the centre of the controversy, increasingly the Catholic apologists cast the
Protestant bishops as mountebanks, English law as Machiavellian policy, and the
Protestant faithful as deceived fools. This might all have been tolerated except that arguments emerged denying Elizabeth’s ecclesiastical authority.” 67
Jewel’s legacy as a founding apologist for the Church of England would last well into the next century as future polemicists turned to his work to wage battle for the religious “truth.” But prior to his death in 1571, Jewel’s defences of the church would come to serve a second purpose, since it was in that year that the famous bishop directed his criticisms against English Protestants who argued in favour of Presbyterianism. Jewel believed correctly that this was a new and formidable threat to church stability; what he
66 There is a certain irony in that Jewel’s “scripturalist” argument to defend the church would be later adopted by Puritans against future representatives of the Church of England. For Jewel’s later confrontation with English Puritanism, see Jenkins, John Jewel 155–201. 67 Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 46. The Elizabeth state viewed such writings as dangerous. As Clegg notes, the government issued ordinances in 1566 allowing representatives working on behalf of the Archbishop to search ships for “lewde and slanderous books” (45). As she goes on to demonstrate, one of the searches in York, in 1566–1567, listed the works of Harding and other Catholic polemicists among the imprints to be confiscated.
36 could not imagine was that this Protestant opposition would help spawn a second round of religious controversy that would rage for decades. 68 The Admonition Controversy forms the starting point for this new polemical battle; however, to understand this 1570s religious debate requires us to return to the start of Elizabeth’s reign.
Those English Protestants who had sought refuge in continental Europe during
Mary’s reign responded to Elizabeth’s 1558 accession with elation. According to one famous Marian exile, the martyrologist John Foxe, Elizabeth’s reign was an act of divine providence: a directive from God for the new queen to restore the English church to its apostolic origins, just as the Ancient Roman Emperor Constantine had done. Those
Englishmen of Foxe’s mindset felt the Elizabethan settlement was a positive first step in the return to Christ’s Apostolic church; but they also believed that a more comprehensive, continental-inspired Reformation program must ensue if the English church were to be fully restored. But such desires were not to be fulfilled. The religious settlement reached in the first four years after Elizabeth’s accession would remain largely intact throughout the duration of Elizabeth’s reign. As a result, some Elizabethan Protestants began to show frustration with the queen’s lack of action as early as the 1560s, arguing emphatically that the English church’s liturgy and polity resembled too closely the Roman Catholic models they supposedly sought to replace. Those critics suggested that to attend services in this partially-reformed and therefore corrupted church was to contradict the will of God and to commit a violation of conscience. In the 1570s, the first voices of an English
Puritanism were heard, and this group, like the English Catholic community in Louvain,
68 Jewel’s responses to Presbyterianism are reprinted in Whitgift’s Answere to a Certain Libell (London, 1573) STC 25427, 322–325 and are discussed in Jenkins, John Jewel 199–201.
37 used printed polemic to critique Elizabeth’s politicians, bishops, and even the queen herself. 69
The writings of Thomas Cartwright in the Admonition Controversy are representative of this new Protestant offensive. As with the Great Controversy, the first proponents of the Admonition Controversy, Cartwright and John Whitgift, were fellow divines who had graduated from Cambridge University. An outstanding preacher,
Cartwright was named Lady Margaret Chair in Divinity at Cambridge University in
1569. 70 Shortly after receiving his prestigious post, Cartwright delivered a series of controversial lectures on the Book of Acts which attracted negative attention from the
University authorities. Those lectures defended the Presbyterian style of church government on the grounds that it resembled most closely the Apostolic framework
69 As Patrick Collinson reminds us “Puritanism” and “Anglicanism” are taxonomies we use as modern commentators to simplify the complexities of individual religious belief and practice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The English Church of this age was a spectrum, in which the ultimate extremes of colour are clear enough, but the intermediate tones merge imperceptibly; or, to change the image, it resembled the French Chamber rather than the English House of Commons, with almost imperceptible gradations towards the left and right, but no sharp polarity of government and opposition. [ The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964)] 27. Peter Lake in his Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church illustrates this point brilliantly by demonstrating that not all divines with puritan sympathies received the same treatment as Cartwright. Many Puritans remained in England during this period, and several even advanced in the church hierarchy, as was the case with both Laurence Chadderton and William Whitaker, who held distinguished posts at Cambridge University. Chadderton was Master of Emmanuel College, while Whitaker served as Master of St. John’s College. One reason for their success is that each of these moderate puritans was adept in his polemical strategies, often able to couch Presbyterian arguments within larger complaints against “Papistry”, the common Protestant enemy. They were also politically savvy; Whitaker and Chaderton had both corresponded warmly with Burghley and Whitgift on different occasions. Therefore, we should be reluctant to classify all Puritans as separatists or opposites to the crown; many were devoted servants who endorsed a more fine-tuned Reformation program that differed, often only slightly, from the state orthodoxy. 70 He was also the only divine to ever be ejected from the post. See Patrick Collinson, Richard Rex and Graham Stanton, “Appendix I: Lady Margaret Professors of Divinity at Cambridge 1502–2002,” Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge 1502–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 88.
38 founded in the scriptures. 71 In 1570, in response to his outspoken views on church polity, the university authorities deprived Cartwright of his Chair, citing Statute 45’s provision against “public criticism of the established religion.” While many of Cartwright’s contemporaries protested the decision, the University upheld its verdict, and their decision was backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Grindal, and England’s
Secretary of State, William Cecil. 72 When the High Commision produced a warrant for
Cartwright’s arrest, in 1573, he sought exile. Without a scholarly post, and under suspicion for treason, Cartwright entered the “Admonition Controversy.”
Any discussion of the “Admonition Controversy” must begin with the 1572
Admonition to the Parliament , a printed pamphlet produced by the preachers John Field and Thomas Wilcox. Aimed at MPs, the Admonition laid out the same Presbyterian-style program of church government that Cartwright had endorsed in his lectures. “The
Admonition” according to Patrick Collinson, “was more outspoken than anything that had yet been published by Protestants against Protestants in England.” 73 Its uncompromising, biting polemic is evident in the pamphlet’s description of the Book of
Common Prayer as “an vnperfecte booke, culled and picted out of that popishe dunghill, the Masse book, full of all abhominations.” 74 Although the work was published anonymously, Field and Wilcox were soon identified as its authors, and were subsequently imprisoned. Whitgift’s Answere to the Admonition was published in late
1572, and then again in early 1573. In this second version Jewel addressed Cartwright
71 This model comprised of a Presbyter overseeing an assembly, or classis, with its own congregation of pastors, elders, and deacons differed significantly from the English church’s hierarchical structure which rested authority in the monarch, archbishop, and bishops. Jenkins notes how Presbyterianism was based on the Bèze-inspired Geneva program derived from Ephesians 4. [Jenkins, John Jewel 197–199]. 72 Patrick Collinson, “Thomas Cartwright,” ODNB . Statute 45 was part of a series of new statutes devised by John Whitgift and Andrew Perne that remained in force until 1853. Collinson, Lady Margaret 72. 73 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement 120–121. 74 Field and Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament (1572?) STC 10847, B3v.
39 directly ( STC 25427–25429). This response marked a new stage in The Admonition
Controversy. 75
Between 1573 and 1577, Cartwright and Whitgift were the central combatants in a new battle of books which resembled in many respects the earlier Harding-Jewel debates. Whitgift, like Jewel before him, defended the structure of English church government legally authorized. As he noted in his preface To the Godlie Reader in the
Defense of the Answere to the Admonition ,76 the religious policy of the church is “by authoritie and consent settled”…“not onely in truthe of doctrine…but also in order of thinges externall touching the gouernment of the Church, and administration of the
Sacrementes” (a2v). That “externall” government, Whitgift proceeded to explain,
“be not namely and particularly expressed in the Scriptures, but in some pointes left to the discretion and libertie of the Church, to be disposed according to the state of tymes, places and persons” (a2v–a3r). In other words, while scripture should influence how the
English church was governed, in cases where scriptural precedent was lacking human intervention was required.
But for Thomas Cartwright and other Puritan detractors Whitgift’s reasoning was flawed. Cartwright upheld the Bèze-inspired position that the church must conform to the model clearly established by the Apostles in the Scriptures. 77 Any innovation or alteration
75 All of the above details are taken from William Joseph Sheils’ ODNB entry for John Whitgift. Whitgift would refute Cartwright again in 1574 (see the next footnote), while Cartwright would continue his polemical attacks on Whitgift as late as 1577 ( STC 4711–12, 4714–15). 76 The Defense of the Answere to the Admonition (London, 1574) STC 25430. In the same year The Defense was published, Whitgift preached one of the influential annual Lent sermons before Elizabeth, a sermon, described by Peter McCullough as “a précis of the establishment’s response to the Presbyterian Challenge.” Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 95. 77 Bèze, as Felicity Heal reminds us, had been critical of the governance of the English church in the years leading up to the Admonition Controversy; he would later welcome Cartwrtight to Geneva in 1571. Indeed, Heal is correct in asserting “Genevan views were well known in English radical circles” and she is right to
40 to that model was a human invention, and thus contrary to God’s will. As Peter Lake explains:
Cartwright continually assumed and asserted that within the practice of the
apostles could be discerned a coherent and consistent model of Church
government which was normative for all subsequent churches…; the
government of the church was not a thing indifferent, it was subject to
direct spiritual injunction. 78
In other words, while both men adopted a biblicist argument by contending that church policy depended in large part on the authority of the scriptures, they disagreed over the extent to which the scriptures should be used to define church doctrine, discipline, and governance. This particular tension, which was central to controversies over the next eighty years, has been regularly characterized as a battle between Anglicans and Puritans; however, in addition to being anachronistic (“Anglicanism” as we know it was not used in English until the eighteenth century) this commonly employed binary ignores the beliefs shared by men like Whitgift and Cartwright.
Harding and Cartwright were nevertheless characterized by their adversaries as not only men who held opposing religious opinions but also dissidents whose beliefs threatened the political security of the realm. 79 Although they were from opposing sides of the religious spectrum, Harding, the English Catholic exile, and Cartwright, the
English Puritan exile, shared a similar dissatisfaction with the state religion. Both men
remind us of the international context influencing this English controversy. See Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 373–374. Both Théodore de Bèze’s works and the works of his teacher John Calvin were extremely popular in early modern England. The STC records nearly 200 entries for these divines. See STC 1997–2054, 4372–4468. 78 Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? 16, 19. 79 See, for instance, Jewel’s criticism of Harding’s understanding of the pope’s power and its implications in his dedication to Elizabeth, A Defence of the Apologie (London, 1567) STC 14600 A2v–A3v.
41 felt that the Elizabethan religious settlement was a corrupt representation of the church sanctioned by Christ and his apostles. Yet despite their disagreements with the state, both men continued to pledge obedience to their monarch. They only sought exile because the
English state was unwilling to tolerate their religious beliefs and practices.
English divines who debated in the later Elizabethan decades regularly made reference to The Great Controversy and The Admonition Controversy, as they continued to debate how the church should be governed and how and if the state should enforce religious uniformity. The legacy of these controversies can be seen in a comment made in
October 1603. Only months after James’s accession to the English throne, at the time of the campaigns of Puritan petitioning following the king’s accession, Matthew Hutton,
Archbishop of York, wrote to John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, complaining:
these Lucians or Luciferians, intend to disgrace and deface The Book of
Common Prayer , and the Ministration of the Sacraments; either to
overthrow it or (at least) to alter it…This matter began almost Forty Years
ago; and hath been answered First, and very sufficiently by your grace,
unto TC and since very well by divers others. 80
Hutton was right that the matter “had been answered” by Whitgift, but that answer continued to be insufficient to many. As a result, opponents of the state religion, writing in the 1580s and 1590s, would adopt a similar polemical strategy as they tackled the same issues time and again. To read these works is to experience a kind of echo effect: new voices, adopting familiar strategies to tackle old issues. But one important difference
80 “ The opinion of Matthew Hutton , Archbishop of York, touching certain matters, like to be brought in question before the King’s most excellent Majesty at the Conference at Court. Written October 9. 1 MO . Jacobi, to the Archbishop of Canterbury ” (MSS. R. Thoresby), John Strype, The Life and Acts of… John Whitgift (London, 1821) 397. Hutton’s “TC” is clearly a reference to Thomas Cartwright.
42 stands out. Beginning in the 1580s, we see polemicists increasingly targeting secular authorities like William Cecil and the legislation they oversaw. Religious conformity was thus increasingly defined as a constitutional issue. Indeed, polemicists throughout this period regularly stated that the crown’s laws violated the private rights of citizens protected since Magna Carta . English Jesuits and Puritans living in exile demanded that matters of conscience not be subject to human law. Despite their complaints, though, the
Elizabethan state intensified the political hold on private faith. 1583 would prove to be a pivotal year in this regard as John Whitgift, newly appointed as Archbishop of
Canterbury, tightened the government conformist policy by approving a set of articles to be used by the Elizabethan Court of High Commission. Those articles were devised primarily to target puritans, as Ethan Shagan explains.
Suspects were to be interrogated upon their oaths ex officio mero —that is,
required of the mere office of the commissioners rather than as a result of
accusation by an opposing party or official government persecution.
What this meant in practice, Shagan continues, is “that a person suspected of one crime might be asked about others as well, depending on where initial inquiries led.” 81 The result was that the mere “suspicion” of a criminal offence could ultimately lead to a complete interrogation of a subject’s personal beliefs.
Under this oath, suspected heretics were forced to acknowledge belief in the central tenents of the Book of Common Prayer , and those who challenged the oath could be stripped of their offices, and, in some cases, imprisoned. Prior to 1583, many Puritans simply refused to take oaths of this kind by adopting a stance reminiscent of the modern
81 Ethan H. Shagan, “The English Inquisition: Constitutional Conflict and Ecclesiastical Law in the 1590s” HJ 47.3 (2004): 544.
43
American fifth amendment. But after 1583 such silence was interpreted by the Court as guilt. Still, as Christiana Luckyj has noted, many Elizabethans, even high ranking statesmen, were critical of the ex-officio oath. William Cecil, Lord Burghley challenged
Whitgift’s actions, claiming the commissioners resembled “Spanish Inquisitors.” 82 But defenders of the ex officio argued that the courts were simply working to the spirit of the
English Reformation.
For Richard Cosin, the chief apologist of the ex-officio oath and spokesperson for
Archbishop Whitgift, the oath was a product of the Reformation statutes enacted during
Henry VIII’s reign. That Cosin required seven hundred pages to justify its existence, however, suggests that this Reformation precedent was far from obvious. Shagan illustrates the typical process of interrogation used by the Court of High Commission to obtain the oath:
If a puritan were interrogated by the Court of High Commission for (for
instance) refusal to wear a surplice, the judge, having good cause to
suspect the puritan, could ask him if he favoured a Presbyterian form of
government. Now favouring Presbyterianism was no crime, but supporting
it out loud was. So when the puritan admitted under oath that he supported
Presbyterianism, now suddenly that belief had become words, and he
could be prosecuted. Here, then, Cosin took advantage of the fact that
oaths converted consciences to words, blurring the government’s own
distinction between criminal prosecution and religious persecution. 83
82 A Moving Rhetoricke: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) 35. 83 Shagan, “The English Inquisition” 560–561.
44
What begins here as a trial of outward conformity slowly shifts to become an interrogation of inward beliefs, a process that threatens human liberties protected under
Magna Carta .
English Catholics were making similar complaints at this time. In 1584, William
Allen, the head of the English Jesuits at Rheims, complained that the “new statutes… make cases of conscience to be treason”, and that “a number [of Catholics in England] haue bene also tormented, arreigned, condemned and executed, for mere matter of
Religion” (A1r–v).84 “Therefore,” Allen contended “we most iustelie make our complaint to God & man that you doe vs plain violence and persecute vs wythout al equitie and order” (C2r). Allen’s work was a response to William Cecil’s claim in a 1583 pamphlet that matters of conscience were not subject to human law, and that such complaints to the contrary were false. 85 Despite Cecil’s apology, things would only get worse for English
Jesuits and other Seminarian Priests in the years to follow. For instance, a 1585 act barred their entrance into the country, 86 and as a result, many Jesuits resorted to
“dissimulation”—both physical disguise and verbal equivocation—in order to survive if they chose to stay in or return to England. In other words, while the government claimed it refused to place restrictions on individual faith, the reality was that private belief was regularly subjected to legal enforcement.
Those brave enough to venture illegally into England, in the hopes of converting
English Protestants and of refining the beliefs of English Catholics, risked their lives in the process. But those that made the dangerous journey—as was the case with Robert
84 A True Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholiques that Suffer for their Faith both at Home and Abroade ([Rouen], 1584), STC 373. 85 The Execution of Iustice in England for Maintenaunce of Publique and Christian Peace (London, 1583) STC 4902. 86 27 Eliz. c.2
45
Southwell (1561–1595) and Henry Garnet (1555–1606), trained at the recently established English College in Rome, and who entered England secretly in 1586— resorted to disguise and other forms of deception to conceal their identities. 87 As Perez
Zagorin explains, Jesuits
were forced to dress as laymen, use false names and pretend to various
occupations. They had to move for safety from one place to another, find
refuge in Catholic households willing to risk receiving them, and secure
hiding places for themselves in the event of search. They had to be
prepared to respond to dangerous questioning and be ready for arrest at
any moment. 88
When caught, Jesuits survived “dangerous questioning” by using equivocation. Although systematic equivocation—that is to say one thing, but mean another—was by no means a
Renaissance invention, 89 the doctrine was increasingly associated with the Jesuits in this period. Garnet, in particular, made the doctrine famous. His Treatise of Equiuocation , later retitled, significantly, as A Treatise Against Lying and Fraudulent Deception , was circulating in manuscript soon after the trial and execution of Robert Southwell in 1595. 90
According to Garnet, equivocation and other similar acts of dissimulation were not the same as lying. As Johann Sommerville neatly summarizes: “it is not,” according to these
87 Both men were trained at the English College in Rome. Southwell would also study in Douai, another hub of Jesuit training. 88 Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990) 189. 89 An extended defense of equivocation was conducted as early as the thirteenth-century by St. Raymond of Pennafort; moreover, Jesuits often cited Paul, even Christ, as examples of those who equivocated in times of struggle. See Zagorin 177. 90 Two manuscripts of the treatise survive, one in the Bodleian Library (Laud Miscellanea, 655), the other in the English College in Rome. Both are discussed in A.E. Malloch, “Father Henry Garnet’s Treatise of Equivocation,” Recusant History 15 (1981): 387–395. The standard modern edition is the 1851 London one, edited by David Jardine.
46 proponents, “lying to make a statement which possesses both true and false meanings, provided that it is true according to your sense ( sensus ) or meaning ( intentio ).” 91 As
Zagorin adds, “one could keep silent about the truth or hide it as long as one did not directly deny it” (187). But what did this theory mean in practice? Writing in 1587 to a senior Jesuit in Rome, Claudio Aguaviva, Garnet, now superior of the English Jesuits, spoke anxiously:
It is no small question among us whether when a priest is asked by a
magistrate if he is a priest or not, he is allowed expressly to deny it. To
some this denial appears tantamount to denying Christ. 92 By 1590, Garnet
concluded that such denial was permitted in extreme circumstances,
especially as a means of defense. 93
But future apologists for the church characterized such Catholic and Puritan acts of resistance as both disrespectful to the crown and equally dangerous to the state. As
Richard Bancroft would note in 1593:
The experience which we haue hereof at this day in the Church of
England, is more the pregnant: partly through the diuelish and traitorous
practices of the Seminary Priests and Iesuites and partly by reason of the
lewd and obstinate course, held by our pretend refourmers, the
Consistorian Puritanes: both of them labouring with all their might, by
91 “The ‘new art of lying’: Equivocation, Mental Reservation and Causistry,” Conscience and Causistry in Early Modern Europe , ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 167. 92 Cited in Zagorin, 189–190. 93 For a consideration of this defensive dissimulation in the larger context of sixteenth-century English Jesuit thought, see Stefania Tutino, “Between Nicodenism and ‘honest’ Dissimulation: the Society of Jesus in England,” HR 79 (2006): 534–553.
47
rayling, libelling and lying, to steale away the peoples herts from their
gouernours. (B1v–B2r) 94
In his critique of these “disturbers” of the realm Bancroft focused heavily on the controversial “Romish” doctrine that permitted Catholics to refuse oaths administered by the state if they in any way threatened the safety of other Catholics (B2r–B3v), and on
Puritan writings that sanctioned the right to resist monarchs who refused to reform the church (B4r–C1r). These two bodies of writing touched upon issues central to the more radical doctrines of resistance and tyrannicide circulated by Puritans and Catholics in the same period. Simply, if a monarch did not protect and uphold religious truth, did the subject have the right to use disguise and deception or, even worse, force to uphold God’s will? In 1570, Pope Pius V’s decision to excommunicate Elizabeth I with the famous bull
Regnans in Excelsis brought the subject of resistance to the forefront for many Catholics, as there was now a justification for disobeying one’s sovereign. From the 1560s through to the end of Elizabeth’s reign, much of the religious controversial literature produced by
Protestants and Catholics would address whether subjects had the right to ignore, deny allegiance to, or resist a monarch if that monarch failed to uphold God’s will. The legacy of this debate would not end when Elizabeth died in 1603; James’s reign would be defined in large part by how he and his government responded to the politics of post-
Reformation religious belief and practice.
Within the Elizabethan world of heated polemic—the world where Jewel
Harding, Whitgift, Cartwright, Bancroft, Cosin, Garnet and Cecil battled for religious truth—individual religious faith was regularly discussed in political terms. It is this political dimension of religious belief and practice, found in Elizabethan polemic, that is
94 Bancroft, Davngerous Positions and Proceedings (London, 1593) STC 1344, B1v–B2r.
48 so central to understanding the drama discussed in this thesis: this political dimension helps explain Katherine’s and Gardiner’s debate over the legitimacy of particular religious practices and the constitutional obligations to perform them; this political dimension proves the greatest obstacle to Elizabeth’s faith in If You Knovv Not Me ; and this political dimension fuels the rhetoric of insurgency voiced by exiled Catholics in
Dekker’s VVhore of Babylon . While the first audiences of the Stuart drama on the Tudor royals may not have recalled the exact details of the Jewel-Harding or Whitgift-
Cartwright controversies as they watched characters on stage debate the politics of religious conformity, they would have been more than familiar with this particular kind of debate because it continued to dominate the religious and political culture of early
Stuart England. Since modern critics are often unfamiliar with this kind of early modern debate, they are also less likely to interpret the theatrical experience in these plays as a byproduct of religious polemic. One of the chief contributions of this thesis, then, is to define and to describe a political-religious context that was familiar to early moderns and yet is foreign to us.
49
CHAPTER TWO
“We are her subject, and obay her hest”: Thomas Heywood’s If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie (Part One) and the Politics of Toleration, c. 1603–1605
On 24 March 1603, after a prosperous forty-four year reign, Elizabeth I of
England died. Thomas Dekker captured the mood of shock and awe that resonated throughout London in response to Elizabeth’s death:
To report of her death (like a thunder-clap) was able to kill thousands, it tooke
away hearts from millions: for hauing brought vp (euen vnder her wing) a nation
that was almost begotten and borne vnder her; that neuer shouted any other Aue
than for her name, neuer sawe the face of any Prince but her selfe, neuer
vnderstoode what that strange out-landish word Change signified: how was it
possible, but that her sicknes should throw abroad an vniuersall feare, and her
death an astonishment? (B2r) 95
Dekker’s account of a nation incapable of imagining any other leader then Elizabeth is what we would expect from a literary mind attempting to document the communal response to the death of England’s queen. However, Dekker’s powerful hyperbolic description of the reaction to
Elizabeth’s death is an anomaly among contemporary literary responses. Many of England’s most talented writers—Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne—remained silent at the news of the Tudor queen’s death, a point that did not go unnoticed. Frustrated by this lack of response, Henry
Chettle chided his contemporary poets for not rising to the occasion. “In a word,” Chettle wrote in the preface to his Englands Mourning Garment :
the negligence of many better able, hath made me bold to write a small Epitomie,
touching the abu[n]dant vertues of Elizabeth our late sacred Mistris. Intreating of
95 The VVonderfull Yeare (London, 1603) STC 6535.5.
50
her Princely birth, chast life, royall gouernment, and happie death; being a Lady
borne, liuing, raigning, dying, all for Englands good. (A2r) 96
Those who wrote poems for Elizabeth, particularly those who penned elegies, were often remiss in their mourning for the late queen. Instead of heartfelt complaints, most poets showed little sense of sorrow at the news of her death. Seemingly insincere, these tempered reactions accorded with the generic demands of English renaissance elegy. Unlike Dekker’s report, elegy in this period was defined by a specific set of rules for mourning and consolation. As one of our foremost critics of the genre notes, in this period “grief is permissible but must be moderate.” 97
To mourn excessively over the late queen was to ignore the formal requirements of early modern
English elegy and to break decorum. Moreover, poets writing in 1603 struggled not only with how to commemorate the loss of Elizabeth, but also with how to celebrate the accession of their new king, James I. Consequently the Tudor-Stuart transition inspired a generic hybrid fit for the occasion, a form of poetic tribute that mixed elegy with panegyric. Works printed in 1603 such as the anonymous Sorrovves Ioy. Or, A Lamentation for our Late Deceased Soveraigne
Elizabeth, with a Triumph for the Prosperous Succession of our Gratious King, Iames, &c .
98 illustrated how poets blended familiar verse forms to fit the political events of 1603. Upon reviewing these occasional transition poems, it becomes immediately apparent that the lines devoted to the loss of the queen are outweighed by the lines celebrating the accession of the
96 Englands Mourning Garment: Worne Heere by Plaine Shepheards, in Memorie of their Sacred Mistresse, Elizabeth (London, 1603) STC 5122. 97 G.W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 27. 98 STC 7598. This and other occasional responses to the Tudor-Stuart transition often use paradox to emphasize the inexpressibility of the moment. For another example, see Samuel Daniel’s A Panegyricke Congratvlatorie Delivered To the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie (London, 1603) STC 6260.
51 king. 99 For English poets in 1603, the forty-four year Tudor reign was of secondary concern to the prospect of what a Stuart succession might bring. 100
But not all poets were ready to forget the Tudor legacy. An important exception found in the occasional printed verse of 1603 was The Poores Lamentation for the Death of Our Late
Dread Soueraigne the High and Mightie Princesse Elizabeth …. VVith their prayers to God for the High and Mightie Prince Iames (London, 1603). 101 Unlike other poetic responses to the transition, this anonymous poem devoted more than two-thirds of its verses to Elizabeth. Rather than celebrate the queen’s virtues and accomplishments as Chettle did, or reflect on the impact of her loss as Dekker had, the writers of The Poores Lamentation opted to rehearse a familiar story from Elizabeth’s turbulent years as princess, one that recounted her being accused of treason, imprisoned in London’s tower, nearly executed, set on trial to defend herself against calls for her execution, and ultimately, survive to reign as queen (A3v–B1r). This poem reminded readers that Elizabeth survived Catholic, Marian England because she “rightly feare[d] the Lord, / And lou’d the trueth, and Papistry abhord” (B1r). The Poores Lamentation emphasized how all of the achievements and glory of Elizabeth’s reign resulted from God’s protection of her during her years as princess; the elegy stood as a reminder that Elizabeth’s prosperity depended on her embracing the Reformation and its ideals. And although The Poores Lamentation represents a tribute to the past, since it recounts a famous story from Elizabeth’s youth, when read in light of the English religious politics of 1603–1605 the work functions less as a nostalgic homage and more as a contemporary cultural commentary. The story engages directly with the early Stuart crises over religious toleration and political obedience.
99 This is true in the ten occasional poems I have looked at for 1603–1604. 100 Denis Kay concurs. In his chapter on elegies for Elizabeth, he explains how “numerous individuals writing in the spring of 1603 had … their eyes fixed more firmly on the future then the past.” See his Melodious Tears: The English Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 83. 101 STC 7594.
52
While The Poores Lamentation was an occasional poem produced for a specific transitional moment in 1603, the story it recounted remained popular throughout the seventeenth century. Thomas Heywood’s play of 1604 If You Knovv Not Me, You Knovv No Bodie, or The
Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (Part One), the subject of this chapter, adopted the same narrative from Elizabeth’s early years. By dramatizing a story in which Elizabeth is persecuted for her
Protestant beliefs, Heywood reminded his playgoers and readers of the contemporary debates over religious toleration; and in seeing non-conformist complaint as the play’s dominant discourse, contemporaries could find in this history of the Tudor past specific strategies employed by both Catholics and Puritans in the various petitions and polemics produced in the first years of James’s reign. This play of Elizabeth’s youth would have resonated with its first audiences as politically sensitive because the play’s historical subject matter engaged with current Stuart controversies.
For many of the new king’s subjects, James’s succession marked an opportunity for an alternative state policy on religion. As we have seen, Puritans, in particular, believed the
Elizabethan religious settlement was flawed, and that England’s church represented only a partial reformation since it continued to promote a “popish”, and therefore, illegitimate church hierarchy. As a result, Puritans called upon the new Stuart king to complete a reformation that they felt had been left unfinished by the previous Tudor monarchs. But by early 1604 it was clear that James and his ecclesiastical establishment would uphold the status quo; in fact, the legislation on religious conformity created throughout 1604, in the wake of the Hampton Court
Conference, was more restrictive than the previous Elizabethan laws on religious uniformity.
Disappointed Puritans pleaded with their king, in a series of polemics produced in both manuscript and print, to reconsider his religious agenda, or, at least to grant greater toleration for
53 the practice of alternative religious beliefs. English Catholic recusants also wrote polemics petitioning their king for more tolerant policies. The non-conformist positions, both the Puritan and the Catholic, were similar, since both insisted that an English subject could hold a different set of religious principles, and practice an alternative form of worship, than that legislated by the crown, and still remain a loyal subject. But James and his episcopacy disagreed, and they were quick to respond to this dissent by stripping Puritan divines of their offices and fining and imprisoning Catholics under the reinstated penal laws. Given the ubiquity of the story of
Elizabeth’s troubled years during Mary’s reign, potential playgoers in 1604 were likely not surprised to discover that Heywood’s If You Knovv Not Me adapted this particular story of the late queen’s early years as princess; what may have been less predictable is that the play would adopt the familiar rhetoric of toleration circulating in the immediate period surrounding the
Hampton Court Conference. This chapter contends that Heywood’s play uses the past to draw attention to a particular Stuart political-religious crisis. As with the elegies alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, Heywood’s If You Knovv Not Me does not aim to “capitalize on the myth of and nostalgia for the late monarch,” 102 but uses a well-known story from Elizabeth’s life—particularly her difficult years as a Protestant subject—to expose the controversies over political obedience experienced by non-conformists in 1603–1604. In other words, Heywood’s history play functions as topical commentary.103
102 Barbara J. Baines, Thomas Heywood (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984) 27. If we are going to characterize the play as nostalgia, it is not because it yearns to celebrate the late queen, but rather because it finds an analogue for non-conformity in Elizabeth Tudor, the royal “subject” who suffered persecution in her “uncrowned youth”. See Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 53–54. 103 Such a topical reading is warranted given the use of the story during Elizabeth’s reign. As Thomas Freeman has shown, John Foxe’s account of “The miraculous preseruation of Lady Elizabeth,” in his Actes and Monuments, was repeatedly employed throughout Elizabeth’s reign in poems, sermons and other writings. In several instances, including the revised versions of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, the story functioned as an encoded commentary, designed to remind the queen of her Reformation commitments. Freeman contends that those disaffected Protestants, including Foxe, who were upset with the queen’s
54
1. The Tudor Play and Its Stuart Politics
Staged c. 1604, soon after the re-opening of the theatres and about a year after James’s accession, If You Knovv Not Me was first performed during an uncertain time of political transition, and was available for purchase in London bookstalls a year later. 104 One of the earliest
failure to fully reform the church throughout the 1570s–1590s used the story to remind her that she had been protected by God during Mary’s reign in order to ensure she ascend the throne and restore the church to its original state. In 1604, this prescriptive message could easily be applied to King James and his church officials. See Thomas S. Freeman, “Providence and Prescription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs ,” Myth of Elizabeth , eds. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003) 27–53. For an analysis of the manuscript notes used for the story, and how they were shaped “to criticize Elizabeth” see Freeman, “As True a Subject being Prysoner:” John Foxe’s Notes on the Imprisonment of Princess Elizabeth, 1554–1555,” EHR 142 (2002): 104–116. 104 The title, STC 13328, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 5 July 1605. Part Two of the play, which is not discussed in this thesis, was entered on 14 September of the same year. Part One stands among the most popular printed plays produced in Tudor-Stuart England, with eight quarto editions published between 1605 and 1639. Peter W. M. Blayney ranks If You Knovv Not Me in his list of bestselling plays as tied for fourth among editions reprinted inside any twenty-five year period between the years 1580 and 1642. See his “The Publication of Playbooks,” A New History of Early English Drama , ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 388. Despite its popularity, the play has until recently received scant attention from critics. Such neglect has resulted largely from a perception of Heywood’s printed text as flawed. Following Butter’s last quarto edition in 1639, the play remained out of print for more than two hundred years. Its first modern editor, John Payne Collier, adopted the prevailing critique of nineteenth-century critics, by commenting on the “great incompleteness of the play” (“Introduction,” Two Historical Plays on the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth by Thomas Heywood . [London: Shakespeare Society, 1851]) xx. Since Collier, editors and critics have repeatedly critiqued the play’s use of repetitive language, its unmetrical and prosaic verse, its tendency to summarize and paraphrase, not to mention its unusually short length. Early twentieth-century criticism of the play, which was heavily influenced by the work of E.K. Chambers, W.W. Greg and the New Bibliography, labeled the play as corrupt, as unauthorial, and thus a “bad” quarto. This obsession over its inadequacies led to a number of debates over the play as a product of memorial construction. The most convincing case in this regard was made in G.N Giordano-Orsini’s “The Copy for ‘ If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobodie ’ Part I,” Times Literary Supplement 4 Dec. 1930: 1037, and “Thomas Heywood’s play on “The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth,” The Library 4th ser. 14:3 (1933): 313–338. Editor Madeline Doran agreed, noting that the play “clearly passed through a state of memorial transmission.” (Introduction, If you know not me you know nobody Part I. [London: Malone Society Reprints, 1934 (1935)] xvi). A similar observation is offered in W.W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration , 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1962) 1:339, entry 215a, note 2. More recent criticism, fortunately, has steered away from this obsession with the play’s aesthetic inadequacies. Recent scholars examine the play’s treatment of femininity, its representation of nascent liberalism and its engagement with Foxean polemic. Assessments include, for instance, Jean E. Howard, “Staging the Absent Woman: The Theatrical Evocation of Elizabeth Tudor in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody , Part 1,” Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage . eds. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) 263–280; Teresa Grant, “Drama Queen: Staging Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody ,” The Myth of Elizabeth , eds. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (New York: Palgrave, 2003) 120–142; John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 36–55; and Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 67–90.
55 post-1603 printed treatments of a Tudor life,105 Heywood’s play, which derives from the story found in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs , records the trials—accusations of treason, imprisonment, and threats of execution—Elizabeth Tudor suffered as a Protestant princess living in her Catholic sister Mary’s reign (1553–1558). Shortly into the play, Elizabeth is placed under house arrest for her supposed involvement in Wyatt’s rebellion. Despite her repeated pleas of innocence, she is removed from her estate at Ashbridge and imprisoned in the Tower, before eventually being transported safely to Woodstock. During her imprisonment she is interrogated by the play’s ultimate villain, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and her sister, Queen Mary. Elizabeth survives, and the final scene of the play stages her triumphant coronation entry into London.
Based closely on records of the historic event of 1559, the play’s final exchange reenacts a famous pageant in which the queen receives the English Bible as part of a symbolic moment explained as the recovery of Truth by Time. In this hagiographic play, the princess becomes queen because of a providential protection of the “true” Protestant faith.
If You Knovv Not Me adheres to a familiar narrative structure, in which an abused individual endures mistreatment to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. As Georgianna
Ziegler explains, Elizabeth functions in the play as a “semi-martyr” because she survives “to lead
105 The pre-1603 plays that take the Tudor past as their primary subject include Sir Thomas More (c. 1595), Thomas, Lord Cromwell (London, 1602) STC 21532, and the non-extant two-part play Cardinal Wolsey (1601). One other non-extant example is entered in Henslowe’s Diary , the play of Lady Jane , dated 1602. Some scholars suggest that this play may have been the source for both The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (London, 1607) STC 6537, and sections of If You Knovv Not Me. See Arthur Melville Clark, Thomas Heywood. Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931) 30–34, 108, 217. For a challenge to Clark’s theory, see Mary Forster Martin, “ If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobodie , and The Famous History of Thomas Wyatt ,” The Library, 4th ser. 13.3 (1932): 272–81. Although John Lyly, George Peele and Ben Jonson allude to Elizabeth in their plays, they do so using allegorical and iconographic representations of her. It is unlikely that prior to 24 March 1603 London authorities would have permitted a boy actor to represent and act out detailed experiences of the then living queen. Even after 1603, a staged representation of the most familiar Tudor life and image still fresh in recent London memory would have been provocative, if not potentially dangerous subject matter.
56 her people to salvation.” 106 But the path to salvation is designed around a series of repeated scenarios, and no scenario is more dominant than that of the non-conformist (Elizabeth and other
Protestants) pledging obedience to the monarch. In other words, while readers experience
Elizabeth’s tribulations chronologically, they also experience them as variations of the same kind of scene time and again. This use of a repeated scenario is particularly important to my topical argument, since in 1604 an essential component of non-conformist petitioning was the insistence on total obedience to the crown. In considering this theme of obedience, I will examine the language of non-conformist polemic in 1603–1605, and how that discourse manifests itself in the play, in order to provide a seventeenth-century vantage point for interpreting the politics of If
You Knovv Not Me .
1a) Measuring Loyalty in Marian England: Dodds’s Predicament
If You Knovv Not Me questions the extent to which religious predilection functions as a measure of political loyalty. This political-religious concern begins early in the play when
Marian sympathizers comment nervously on the recent uprisings and incursions conducted against the state, i.e. on the events surrounding Wyatt’s Rebellion and the unsuccessful attempt to place Lady Jane on the English throne. Bedingfield, who is first to offer an interpretation of these events, notes how each party “had his merite” (A3v) 107 in these uprisings. Bedingfield’s response suggests that each rebel had good reasons for acting the way he did, or, alternatively,
106 Georgianna Ziegler, “‘England’s Savior’: Elizabeth I in the Writings of Thomas Heywood,” Renaissance Papers (1980): 35. For further discussion of the play’s narrative features, see John N. King, “Fiction and Faction in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” John Foxe and the English Reformati on, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997) 12–35. 107 This and all future references are to the first quarto of the play.
57 that each rebel was adequately punished for the crimes he committed.108 Instead of offering his own interpretation, an impatient Howard attempts to silence all discussion of these events by claiming that discussing Wyatt shows disrespect towards the dead: “Tis impious, not by true
Iudgement bread” (A3v). As Nora L. Corrigan reminds us, comments such as Howard’s reflect the play’s “obsessive concern with lawful speech.” 109 Is Howard’s silencing of this political dialogue really a matter of piety, or is his retort made out of fear? Before the reader has time to dwell on the implications of his response, Mary, accompanied by her entourage of cardinals, counselors, and attendants enters with the symbols of English royal authority (crown, mace and purse). The pageantry reflects a familiar visual articulation of early modern state power, and here functions to reinforce Mary’s first words, which are directed towards heaven. Providence, Mary proclaims, was responsible for resisting “all those powers, that war’d against our right” (A4r).
But the controversy over lawful speech will resurface moments later when Dodds,110 the first of several minor Protestant characters to inhabit the play, reminds Mary to uphold a promise to respect religious toleration, and allow for Englishmen “to vse that faith / Which in King Edwards daies was held Canonicall” (A4r). Not only does Mary refuse Dodds’s petition, but also she agrees with Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester’s characterization of his request as a bold insult to state authority. While this scene offers an early glimpse into the mind of a tyrant queen, it also reminds us that Mary’s greatest power lies not so much in her actions, as in her ability to inspire fear and prevent open dialogue.
108 OED “merit” offers various meanings, ranging from “The quality of deserving well, or of being entitled to reward or gratitude” (1a), to the now obsolete meaning “The condition or fact of deserving reward or punishment” (2b). 109 “English Commoners and Communities on the Early Modern Stage,” diss., Chapel Hill U, 2006, 65. 110 In Foxe’s account of the story, the primary source for Heywood’s play, Elizabeth stops at a Maister Dodds house at Mymmes” in her travels from Ashbridge to the court. That no other details are given about the man or his beliefs, suggests that Heywood’s portrayal is fictional. See Foxe, A&M 1583 5A3.
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The scene also draws attention to a question that runs throughout the play. Can religious non-conformists be obedient subjects? For Dodds, the answer is an unequivocal yes, and his assertion derives from a two-fold conception of obedience, one that draws a division between inward religious belief and outward political loyalty. This division is apparent in the language he employs to defend himself. By referring to the queen as “Gratious Soueraigne” and “the next and true successiue heir,” Dodds acknowledges Mary’s political authority and the legitimacy of
English hereditary monarchy. His request for religious freedom, however, is defined differently: it is a matter of “conscience” (A4r–v). For Dodds, as was the case for so many non-conformists living in post-Reformation England, religious belief was a spiritual condition not subject to human law. Faith was a pact one held with God; to subject that pact to secular authority was to violate a Christian’s most treasured covenant. Mary’s chief bishop sees things differently; even though Winchester may characterize Dodds as a heretic, he conceives of Dodds’s crime as a political violation: a challenge to the state authority. Winchester is adamant that common subjects not set conditions on the queen, and that any request of this kind, therefore, represents an act of disobedience: “Before they gouerne / they shall learne t’obay” (A4r). As the guilty
Dodds is ushered off stage, audience members are left not only with a snapshot of Marian tyranny but also with a situation familiar to many of the new king’s subjects. This is not only
Dodds’s problem; it is their problem too.
The different perspectives on political obedience staged in this scene would have resonated with contemporary audiences as a familiar subject debated in the numerous polemics and pamphlets produced in the first years of James’s reign. The Catholic and Puritan appeals for religious toleration, made between 1603 and 1605, resemble the plea made by Dodds. Common to all these petitions is the assertion that an English subject could remain loyal to his or her king
59 while holding unorthodox religious beliefs. John Colleton’s A Supplication to the Kings Most
Excellent Maiestie Wherein, Seuerall Reasons of State and Religion are Briefly Touched
([London,] 1604) provides a fitting example. 111 Colleton, like Dodds, advocates religious toleration while promising absolute loyalty to James:
The onley degree of fauour that we seeke at your Maiesties handes in this case, is,
that out of your Princely compassion, you would bee pleased to reuerse the penal
lawes, enacted by our late Soueraign against Catholicke beleeuers and to licence
the practice of Religion in priuate houses without molestation to Priest or lay
persons for the same. (A3r)
In exchange for what Colleton describes as “toleration of religion” and “freedome of conscience,” English Catholics will “hold themselues infinitely obliged to your Maiestie, and be ready in all occurrences very willingly to sacrifice their liues and last drop of blood in any seruice soeuer belonging to the defense of your Maiesties person, crowne or dignitie” (A3r–
A3v). 112
Puritan writers were to advocate a similar position, as exemplified in an anonymous broadside of early 1605. The writers, described as “two and Twentie preachers,” argue: “If any thinge were commaunded vs by your Maiestie, which we might doe, without offence to the highest Maiestie, there is not a man amonge vs that would not willingly obey the same, though it were to the losse of all he hath, yea, of his very life.” As with Colleton’s plea, here again was a pledge of absolute loyalty, and like Colleton’s, one that comes with conditions. The writers
111 STC 14432. 112 Colleton was not alone. Even the most embittered of English Recusants were confident the new English king would offer greater toleration for Catholics: “I do not doubt” wrote the Jesuit leader Robert Parsons, “but they shall find the effectes of his clemency for their delivery out of such afflictions, calamities and oppressions as they have suffered.” “An Addition of the Author to the Aforesaid Catholiques, Vpon the Newes of the Queenes Death,” A Treatise of Three Conuersions of England (St. Omer, 1603), STC 19416, (*5r–v).
60 continued, “But being perswaded that the saide ceremonies, and many thinges else in those bookes, are repugnant to the worde of God, we most humbly beseech your Highnesse to spare our consciences.” 113 “Those bookes” could refer to the Book of Common Prayer or the Thirty- nine articles, but given the timing of the remark, the reference is likely to the new ecclesiastical canons on religious conformity, produced by the episcopacy after the Hampton Court
Conference, and made law in 1604. 114 These new canons were especially troubling for ministers with Puritan sympathies because these divines refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of many of the Church of England’s ceremonies, arguing they were human inventions rather than divinely sanctioned acts. To subscribe to the new canons, they argued, was to disobey God and thus commit a violation of conscience.
But the Jacobean administration viewed the matter differently, arguing that a failure to subscribe, no matter what the defense, would result in deprivation, and between 1604 and 1609 more than eighty ministers in England were deprived of their benefices. 115 Such actions by the
Jacobean state spurred a flurry of responses from disaffected clergy, and the result was a new underground puritan printing campaign. One of the more prolific voices in that campaign was
William Bradshaw’s. As a student of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in the 1580s and 90s,
113 To the Kinges Most Excellent Maiestie the Humble Petition of Two and Twentie Preachers in London and the Suburbs Thereof ([London, 1605]) STC 16779.12, [A1r]. This is one of the interesting points about the Puritan position, for while they similarly imagined the Stuart succession as an era of greater toleration, it was one characterized by less rather than more toleration for non-conformist beliefs and practices within the Elizabethan church. 114 By December 1604, senior bishops in the church government began visiting parishes throughout England. As part of that visitation, ministers were asked to subscribe to a series of articles acknowledging the legitimacy of the liturgical and ceremonial aspects of the English church. Those articles were made public as part of the Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall (London, 1604) STC 10070. For further discussion, see my Chapter Three. 115 The Hampton Court Conference of January 1604 simply confirmed James’s reluctance to alter Tudor ecclesiastical policies on church governance, liturgy, and polity. And yet James continued to promote tolerance amongst the warring factions On James’s pleas for consensus, see Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I,” Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 169–207, and William B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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Bradshaw was exposed to a number of influential men with puritan tendencies, and this exposure helped him to gain patronage for a range of important positions. 116 Following James’s ascension to the English throne, Bradshaw produced a series of controversial polemics in which he advocated the familiar puritan position that a Christian’s first duty was to follow and uphold
God’s will as outlined in the scriptures, even if such actions contradicted the prerogative of the state. 117 He insisted that it was “a sinne, to force any Christian to doe any act of religion or diuine s[e]ruice, that cannot euidently bee warranted by the same” (A2r). 118 While English bishops might label puritans “schismatickes” for their refusal to practice some of the ceremonies sanctioned by law, Bradshaw argued that such acts of nonconformity were justified because these ceremonies were not founded on the scriptures (A5v). 119 Just because a Protestant refused to conform to the state religion, he was not in opposition to the state. In “refusing to Conforme yet without separation” (A6v), Bradshaw contended, Puritans still remained loyal to the state; they simply disagreed with certain aspects of how the state religion was outwardly practiced and administered. Schism, therefore, was an unfair label for those who remained devoted to the central religious doctrines of the English church (A5r–A7v).
116 In addition to holding various lectureships, Bradshaw served as tutor to various puritan gentry. Ordained in 1598, he was shortly thereafter deprived of his ministerial duties because of his controversial beliefs, then briefly reinstated, only to be deprived again in 1602. When James ascended the throne in 1603, Bradshaw was in London, working as a client of Alexander Redich, a puritan gentleman who was responsible for a petitioning campaign directed to James in December 1604. It was during these early years that Bradshaw produced a string of polemics, some of which were published surreptitiously at the secret press of William Jones, while others were printed abroad at Middelburg in the Protestant Low Countries. Victoria Gregory, “William Bradshaw” ODNB . 117 For discussion of Bradshaw’s polemics, see Lake, Moderate Puritans 262–278 and Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church 97–112. 118 English Puritanisme: Containeing the Maine Opinions of the Rigidest Sort of Those that are Called Puritanes ([London,] 1605) STC 3516. 119 Bradshaw, A Consideration of Certaine Positions Archiepiscopall ([London, 1604–1605]) STC 3509. Bradshaw’s critique of England’s church ceremonies is discussed in further detail in a range of pamphlets. See, for instance, A Treatise of the Nature and Vse of Things Indifferent Tendinge to Proue, that the Ceremonies in Present Controuersie Amongst the Ministers of the Gospell in the Realme of Englande, are Neither in Nature nor Vse Indifferent (London, 1605) STC 3530 and Twelve Generall Arguments, Proving that the Ceremonies Imposed Vpon the Ministers of the Gospell in England, by our Prelates, are Vnlawfull ([Middelburg], 1605) STC 3531.
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Apologists for the church had little time for Bradshaw’s and Colleton’s defenses, for like the play’s Winchester they too viewed such acts of nonconformity as a direct infringement of the law and a potential threat to the security of the realm. Gabriel Powel, one of the church’s most ardent apologists, directed polemics at both Colleton and Bradshaw. In his dedication to A
Consideration of the Papists Reasons of State and Religion for the Toleration of Poperie in
England, Intimated in their Supplication unto the Kings Maiestie ,120 Powel criticized Colleton’s supplication for its “impudencie;” and he insisted that to tolerate the Catholic faith in England would result in an “ouerthrowe of our Christian Church and State, of the Gospell and his excellent Maiestie” (A2r). Powel argued that because the Catholic faith demanded allegiance to the pope and because the pope allowed Catholics to disobey Protestant (i.e. heretic) princes,
England’s Catholics were incapable of “absolute loyalty and seruice vnto his Highnes” (B1v-
B2r, C3r). Puritans in Powel’s eyes were equally impudent, for they too set “conditions” on the king; moreover, their loyalty to the king could not be trusted. That Powel saw Puritans and
Catholics as part of the same threat is best exemplified in his derogatory label for a Puritan:
“puritan-papist.” 121 Powel’s insistence that a subject who conforms to the state religion is performing a political obligation makes sense when we consider the politicized status of the
English post-Reformation church. Since 1534, according to English law, the sovereign was head of the church. To challenge the church according to this logic was to challenge the king’s authority, and a challenge to the king’s authority in action or speech was an act of treason. 122 If we accept Powel’s perspective momentarily, a perspective that parallels Winchester’s in the play,
120 (Oxford, 1604) STC 20144. 121 See, for instance, Powel’s A Refutation of an Epistle Apologeticall Written by a Puritan-Papist (London, 1605) STC 20149. 122 For an extended discussion of the changes to treason law following the Reformation in England, and its influence on a range of early modern literary texts, see Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
63 then Dodds is not a victim of intolerance, but rather an obstinate dissident who refuses to conform to the king’s demands.
Few critics of the play discuss the aforementioned scene involving Dodds, choosing instead to focus on the difficulties Elizabeth encounters in the play. This neglect is unfortunate, for, while the play clearly foregrounds the story of Elizabeth and her troubles during her sister’s reign, it also envisions her as one of many subjects to suffer from the tyranny executed by an intolerable regime. Despite her status as Tudor princess and sister to Mary, Elizabeth, like
Dodds, nevertheless owes the same allegiance to her monarch. 123 Moreover, Elizabeth is shown to be aware of her troubles in relation to others who did not escape the axe, those men and women who were punished for heresy or, depending on a playgoer’s point of view, martyred for upholding their beliefs. 124
Before turning to consider Elizabeth’s role in the play in detail, I want to end this section with a few final remarks on the scene involving Dodds. Teresa Grant, one of the few critics to interpret Dodds’s encounter with Mary and her church hierarchy, suggests that this opening scene serves to “expose Mary as a tyrant” as it situates her “perfidious cruelty” in opposition to
Elizabeth’s repeated acts of “clemency.” 125 Grant’s comments are important, for they remind us that in spite of the play’s overt political-religious subject matter, its characters are designed in the spirit of English morality drama. Seen this way, the play’s binary structure resembles that of
123 If we accept Jean E. Howard’s suggestion that the boy actor playing the princess in 1604–1605 did so in “a single dress, sparingly ornamented,” that is, in attire that drew attention away from her royal status, this would only further accentuate Elizabeth’s position as an English subject. “Staging the Absent Woman” 277. 124 Later in the play, when Elizabeth is imprisoned in the Tower, she asks Gage: “Is yet the scaffold standing on tower hill, / Whereon young Gilford and the Lady Iane did suffer death” D4r. The physical reminders of execution seem to haunt Elizabeth, while giving the spectator a regular sense of the magnitude of her escape. 125 “Drama Queen” 122–123.
64 many classic stories of good versus evil. John Watkins’s reading of the Dodds scene argues for a similar structure, but one that is rooted in legal-political terms:
The conflict between Dodds and Winchester foregrounds a clash between rival
understandings of the English constitution and of the subjects’ relationship to
their ruler. Whereas Dodds imagines a sovereign who listens to her people and
shapes her policies according to their desires, Winchester envisions one who
imposes her will on them without negotiating the terms of their obedience. In
Dodds’ vision of the commonwealth, the citizen stands duty-bound to express his
judgements and convictions in frank conversation with his sovereign. In
Winchester’s, such candor constitutes “insolence” with more than a hint of
treason. 126
Watkins’s comments on obedience and treason are similar to my own, except that he downplays the religious aspect of the debate. Watkins’s reading derives from a larger premise, one that sees
Heywood’s Elizabeth as a “proto-constitutionalist” and an “advocate of the rights of freeborn
Englishmen” (36). Heywood’s Elizabeth, Dodds, and a range of other largely anonymous figures in the play thus become spokespersons for the political freedoms treasured by modern democratic states. According to this interpretation, the play is incredibly modern since it exhibits, even if in nascent form, an early modern liberalism.
But is Dodds really advocating freedom of speech? Let us not forget that his and the petitioners’s agreement with Mary is for freedom of conscience. In other words, Dodds may yearn for a monarch who “shapes her policies” according to public demand, but what he wants even more is a sovereign who acknowledges that individual religious belief and practice are not the state’s business. In other words, if the scene is modern because it precipitates a sense of
126 Representing Elizabeth 43.
65 individual rights, we must not forget that those “rights” are conceptualized through a post-
Reformation mindset. The play’s exposing of whether the state is warranted in legislating religion is understood in distinctively early modern terms. These concerns will resurface when
Elizabeth enters the play, as the Marian authorities examine her religious beliefs and the extent to which they pose a political threat.
2. Elizabeth’s Religious Threat: Guilt by Association
We think of Elizabeth, above all as that bizarre confection of the last part of the
reign: bejeweled, bewigged, beruffed, and utterly artificial. I invite you to
consider another very different Elizabeth, the Elizabeth portrayed as she was
when she was young … a vulnerable teenager in a thug culture. 127
The first of Elizabeth’s specific ordeals in If You Knovv Not Me involves her removal from Ashbridge for suspicion of treason in Wyatt’s rebellion. In both Foxe’s and Holinshed’s version of the story, 128 Sir Richard Southwell, Sir Edward Hastings, and Sir Thomas Cornwallis arrive at Elizabeth’s house in the dead of night with orders to remove her. The play substitutes for the three nobles, two, John Williams, Lord of Tame, and a man named Shandoyse, while making the figure of Gage serve as Elizabeth’s guard. 129 The printed narrative commentary of
Foxe’s account is spoken as dialogue in the play. Gage questions Tame’s behaviour:
127 David Starkey, “Elizabeth: Woman, Monarch, Mission,” Elizabeth: The Exhibition at the National Maritime Museum , ed. Susan Doran (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003) 3–8. 128 A&M 1583; the account printed in the 1587, second, edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles is essentially a reprinting of the account found in Foxe’s 1583 edition, the last of the editions he edited. Whether Heywood used Foxe’s account or Foxe’s account as found in Holinshed is uncertain. What is clear, however, is that Heywood was not a slave to his source: the conversations on state affairs, the pageantry and other historical details that colour the opening sections of the play, for instance, are absent from Foxe’s narrative. 129 In his later prose account, Englands Elizabeth (London, 1631) STC 13313, Heywood notes that Lord Tame spoke for the three knights. This Lord Tame, John Williams, replaces Foxe's Richard Southwell. Did
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Oh, my honored lords
(May I with reuerence presumed to aske)
What meanes these armes, why doe you thus begirt,
A poore weake Lady, neere at poynt of death. (B1v)
Gage’s response is a carefully articulated one, direct and yet still courteous. Elizabeth’s chamberlady will similarly address the guards politely as “My lords,” but firmly insist that any entry to the princess depends on Elizabeth’s permission; 130 still, even though the guards are informed of the severity of Elizabeth’s illness, they enter her chamber “unbidden.” Elizabeth naturally questions their haste:
We are not pleas'd with your intrusions Lords.
Is your hast such, or your affayres so vrgent,
That sudenly, and at this tyme of night,
You presse on me, and will not stay till morne? (B2r)
When the knights plead that they are only following the orders of their sovereign, Elizabeth submits. Despite the improper behaviour shown by the knights, Elizabeth shows total obedience to her sister: “To tender her our life, / We are her subiect, and obay her hest, / Good night, we
Heywood have access to more detailed records that were able to correct Foxe’s earlier assertion? Historically, Gage served as Lord Chamberlain and Captain of the Guard during the Wyatt Rebellion. David Starkey, Elizabeth: the Struggle for the Throne (New York: Harper Collins, 2001) 132. 130 In addition to the story’s political and religious interests, one of its chief themes is social conduct. The wording of the story and the printed marginalia used in Foxe and Holinshed testifies that this is one way to interpret the story. In Foxe, the forced entrance is glossed as “the vnmanerlines of the knights.” It is not simply their intrusion that is faulted, but that they were “vnbidden” in this “vnprouided comming” (5A3v). The laws of hospitality have been broken, and it is this indecent behaviour—a breaking of the social code—that continues to surface in the story as a blot against both Mary and her counselors. The important difference in the play is that the textual gloss is transformed into dialogue, so that the historian’s criticism is voiced by characters.
67 wish you what wee want, / Good rest” (B2r). Elizabeth’s pledge of obedience here is but the first of several gestures of this kind in the play. 131
Although Mary’s actions clearly represent an act of familial betrayal, that betrayal is also imagined in constitutional terms. When Elizabeth first hears the news of her imprisonment, she questions the motives of the queen and makes sure to stress her role as a sister: “A prisoner in the
Tower, / Speake to the Queene my Lords, that some other place / May lodge her sister, that's too vild, too base” (C2r). As with the earlier scenes at Ashbridge, we are reminded of the importance the play places on familial loyalty. That message finds its clearest articulation moments later in one of the oddest but most telling interactions in the play. As three anonymous guards sit waiting, the night before they are to escort Elizabeth to the Tower, they question the recent decision to have her imprisoned. The men treat the matter cautiously, afraid even to mention Elizabeth’s name. The first soldier eventually offers an opinion:
Well sirs I haue two sisters, and the one loues the other,
And would not send her to prison for a million, is there any harme
In this? ile keepe my selfe within compas I warrant you,
For I doe not talke of the Queene, I talke of my sister,
Ile keepe my selfe within my compas I warrant you. (C2v)
While the comparison of Mary’s betrayal to a hypothetical situation involving the soldier’s sister reminds us of the human side of the offense, a code applicable to one and all, it is the soldier’s immediate defense that is particularly striking. Here we experience the power of the state to incite fear in its subjects by preventing open dialogue. The soldier’s repetition of words, and his anxiety over the appropriateness of his thoughts, highlights the play’s concern with freedom of speech. As John Watkins correctly notes, “benevolent characters” such as the anonymous soldier
131 The scene reminds us that despite her royal status Elizabeth, like Dodds, is a subject of the state.
68 provide a “metacommentary” on the suffering felt by Elizabeth. 132 Sussex occupies a similar role to the soldier’s in If You Knovv Not Me. While Sussex may have questioned Elizabeth for her potential involvement in Wyatt’s rebellion, he criticizes Mary’s “hard vsage” (C3v) of her sister. Obedient and devoted to the crown, Sussex, the emblem of merciful dealing, cannot avoid responding to what he sees as unfair treatment. Later, at the Tower, Sussex repeatedly challenges the jailer for treating Elizabeth as a common prisoner, reminding him of the past allegiance he had to her father and the basic rights he owes a not-yet-convicted subject. While the injustices continue against Elizabeth, men like Sussex help to keep her alive by ensuring that her ordeals are addressed and that basic civil liberties are upheld. 133 But nothing is more difficult for Elizabeth to defend than her religion.
One of the assumptions made by the Marian authorities in the play is that Elizabeth’s perceived untrustworthiness is a by-product of her Protestantism. This assumption is made apparent in the discussions over her supposed involvement in Wyatt’s rebellion. Stephen
Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Henry Beningfield, both favourites of Mary, make the case for Elizabeth’s guilt by drawing attention to her religious beliefs. Beningfield asks: “Has not your sister (gratious Queene) a hand / In these peticions; well your highnes knowes / she is a fauourite of these heritiques” (A4v). Beningfield will make a similar claim moments later in his response to Winchester’s contention that Elizabeth was involved in Wyatt’s rebellion, by noting
“Such is your sister, / A meere opposite to vs in our opinion” (A4v). Rather than presenting evidence against Elizabeth, the two men use her religious associations as grounds to condemn
132 Representing Elizabeth 40. 133 As in A&M and Holinshed’s Chronicles , Mary’s husband King Philip is, like Sussex, represented as a merciful defender of justice throughout the play. He questions Mary’s treatment of Elizabeth (B3v), takes measures to reunite Elizabeth and Mary (E2v), and intervenes to prevent the commission to have her executed (F1v). This positive representation of a Spanish prince has led Ivo Kamps to connect the play to the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations in 1604. See his Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 71–73, 82.
69 her. The assumption being made here is that subjects who advocate a religious position differing from the state orthodoxy must be political opposites, and therefore are susceptible to rebellion and other forms of violent resistance. Mary agrees, and sends for commissions to have her sister brought by armed guard to court.
Once she arrives at court, Elizabeth stands trial. While she is convinced of her own innocence, she is clear that her safety depends on a higher power: “They shalbe welcome; my god in whome I trust, / VVill helpe, deliuer, saue, defend the iust” (B4v). When she is questioned on her involvement in Wyatt’s rebellion, Elizabeth asks:
Who is't will say so? men may much suspect,
But yet my Lord, none can my life detect,
I a confederate with those kentish rebells?
Yf I ere saw or sent to them, let the Queene take my head,
Hath not proud Wyat suffered for his offence,
And in the purging both of soule and body for heauen,
Did Wyat then accuse Elizabeth ?
Suss . Madam he did not.
Eliz . My reuerent Lord I know it.
Howard . Madam he would not.
Eliz . Oh my good Lord he could not. (C1r)
In this verbal jockeying, Elizabeth outwits her examiners by turning their questions back at them, all the while ensuring she gets the final word. The whole prosecution has been based on inconclusive evidence, and as the counsel leaves, Elizabeth offers a final soliloquy. In her
70 prayers to a higher authority she silences the shady dealings of secular men. As throughout the proceedings, it is her words we remember:
Thou power eternall, Inocents iust guide,
That sways the Scepter of all Monarchyes,
Protect the guiltlesse from these rauening Iawes,
That hidious death presentes, by Tyrants Lawes,
And as my hart is knowne to thee most pure,
Grant mee release, or patience to endure. (C1v)
And endure she must. The next series of scenes sees her escorted, imprisoned and then interrogated by the Bishop of Winchester and others at the Tower of London. But throughout this series of averted catastrophes 134 Elizabeth continues to insist on the power of providential intervention as the cause for her survival, and in doing so, she conveys the same message found in John Foxe’s account of Elizabeth’s troubles in The Book of Martyrs .
Foxe’s message is repeated in the narrative and the paratext of the early editions of his account, and even conveyed in the very title of the story, “The Miraculous Preseruation of Lady
Elizabeth, nowe Queene of England, from Extreme Calamitie and Danger of Life, in the Time of
Q. Marie her Sister” (see Fig. 3). 135 Foxe’s message of divine preservation is given its fullest expression in the didactic comments that preface the account:
neuer was there since the memorie of oure fathers, any example to be shewed,
wherein the Lordes mightye power hathe more admirably & blessedly shewed it
selfe, to the glory of his owne name, to the comforte of all good heartes, and to
134 The term “averted catastrophe” is taken from Alexander Leggatt’s reading of the play in Jacobean Public Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992) 164 . 135 The title and the quotations that follow are taken from the 1583 edition of Actes and Monuments . The story runs from 5A3v–5B1r (pp. 2091–2098); it is reprinted in Holinshed’s Chronicles (London, 1587) 5R4–5S3 (1151–1160).
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the publicke felicitie of thys whole Realme, then in the miraculous custodie and
outscape of this our souraigne Lady, now Queene, then Ladye Elizabeth, in the
straighte 136 time of Queene Marye her sister. (5R4v)
Foxe’s didacticism is seemingly uncontroversial. The story’s exemplary value is emphasized to remind readers of God’s secret workings, and, particularly, in this case, his protecting of
FIGURE 3
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1583) STC 11225, vol 3, 5A3v. Reproduced by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (call number foxe f 00004).
England’s future Protestant queen. But the repeated stress on God’s actions also serves to emphasize Elizabeth’s passivity, a point Thomas Freeman has pointed to in his reading of Foxe’s account. According to Freeman, Foxe’s story was designed not to praise the queen but rather to
136 Holinshed’s Chronicles substitutes “strict” for Foxe’s “straighte”.
72 rebuke her; as a cautionary tale it served to remind Elizabeth that while God had once preserved her from her Catholic sister, he did so with the expectation that she restore England’s church to its pure, apostolic state. By 1570, it had become clear that Elizabeth and her church hierarchy were unwilling to adopt a fully reformed Calvinist church; therefore, to tell this story in 1570, in
1576, and in 1583, according to Freeman, was to remind Elizabeth of the Protestant commitments she failed to uphold. The story thus functioned as an encoded critique. 137
In If You Knovv Not Me , Elizabeth constantly evokes the divine in a manner reminiscent of the original source text, but here her evocations serve a different function. When read in light of the events of 1604, Elizabeth’s search for divine protection from an intolerant regime forms an analogue to the puritan appeals to the new king. As previously discussed, the central arguments made by early Stuart non-conformists in their petitions and complaints were (a) that English subjects would show obedience to the crown so long as the crown respected their right to religious belief, and (b) that the Jacobean authorities should not use religious belief as grounds for discrimination. These complaints, however, were penned because the crown failed to respect the religious freedoms of puritans, freedoms that non-conformists defined as matters of conscience. To use Elizabeth’s words in the play, the crown needed to “Protect the guiltlesse from . . . rauening Iawes”, but instead employed the “Tyrants Lawes” (C1v). Elizabeth looks to
God for justice because Mary and her church hierarchy fail to protect her religious beliefs, and because they use Elizabeth’s religious beliefs as evidence to incriminate her politically.
Heywood’s first audiences could find in Elizabeth’s situation a familiar, topical counterpoint to what many non-conformists were experiencing in the early years of James’s reign. As a subject who looks to God for assistance to counter the actions of a discriminatory political system,
Elizabeth is not unlike the puritan writers of 1604. And as a writer who uses the didactic
137 Freeman, “Providence and Prescription” 47 and footnote 7.
73 message on providential intervention to expose the failures of a new Stuart government,
Heywood is not unlike Foxe. 138
While others continue to strip Elizabeth of her rights, she responds with obedience, forgiveness and charity. She refuses all forms of comfort and repeatedly has others pass out cups of gold to the poor. Although she takes on the role of martyr, having a servant convey to common Londoners the words tanquam Ouis (E1r), which translates roughly as “like a sheep to the slaughter,” she never gives up hope for her life. Indeed, Elizabeth writes a letter to her sister to try to convince her to act with compassion. 139 Even though she fears her death until the end of the play, she is shown as constant and undeterred. One minute she exchanges roles with a milkmaid in a pastoral fantasy, the next she defends herself to Mary with customary verbal bravado against all supposed crimes. Even after she is declared queen her merciful character comes through. In one of the play’s most humourous moments, taken straight from Foxe,
Elizabeth confronts Bedingfeld, a man who had formerly conspired against her. She speaks:
Be not asham'd man, looke me in the face,
VVho haue you now to patronize your strictnes on?
For your kindnes this I will bestowe,
When we haue one we would haue hardly vs'd
And cruelly delt with, you shall be the man,
138 Alan Bryan Farmer has argued for a topical reading of Stuart history plays like Heywood’s If You Knovv Not Me by suggesting that Nathaniel Butter, publisher of the early quartos, printed these plays at “specific moments when he could capitalize on the religious issues dramatized in them” (e.g. 1612, 1620s, 1632–33). He also suggests, however, that these plays began on stage and in print as “uncontentious representations of England’s past.” Farmer’s argument not only underestimates the politics of 1604–1606 and their applicability to Elizabeth’s situation in the play but also misses the fact that Foxe’s story had been read topically since the 1570s. Why would the story suddenly be un-topical in 1604–1605? See Farmer, “Made like the times Newes”: Playbooks, Newsbooks and Religion in Caroline England,” diss., Columbia U. 2005, 207–208. 139 Elizabeth speaks: “Giue to my pen, a true perswasiue stile, / That it may moue my impatient sisters eares, / And vrge her to compassionate my woe” (E3r). A photo facsimile of this surviving letter is included in Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals , eds. Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003) 29–33.
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This is a day for peace, not for vengeance fit,
All your good deeds wee'le quit, all wronges remit.
Where we left off, proceede. (G3v)
In her final confrontation, showing typical historical flair, Elizabeth offers the most merciful of gestures by not seeking revenge on a man who would have taken her life. As the play comes to a close, Elizabeth proceeds with her coronation entry, where she famously receives the English
Bible. Here, as at the start of the play, we read of a pageant, but this time the visual show is backed by a distinctively Protestant message.
. 3. Time, Truth and the Apotheosis of Elizabeth the Queen
WHAT is Truth ; said jesting Pilate ; And would not stay for an Answer. Francis Bacon. 140
At the end of his account of Elizabeth’s trials, Foxe makes another gesture to the providential intervention responsible for Elizabeth’s preservation, what he describes as “the mightye protection of our mercifull God,” before closing his narrative with an allusion to
Elizabeth’s great transformation: “a prisoner is made a Princesse, and placed in her throne Royal proclaimed nowe Queene.” 141 Foxe’s succinct line offers a miniaturized version of the final scenes of Heywood’s play– scenes that see the imprisoned princess set free before being named queen. The final scene is especially noteworthy for it is not included in Foxe’s account. Here,
Heywood reenacts the most famous pageant from Elizabeth’s 1559 coronation entry, the Veritas
Temporis Filia or “Truth as the Daughter of Time” pageant. Historically, in this fourth of five pageants, Elizabeth receives an English Bible in what one critic has described as “the most
140 “Of Truth.” The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall . . . (London, 1625) STC 1148, B1r. 141 Foxe, A&M 1583 5A6v.
75 densely symbolic moment of the entry”, as “the ideological and programmatic heart of the queen’s civic welcome” and as “the most prescriptive of the series in political and religious terms, the culmination of a series of didactic tableaux.” 142 Elizabeth’s receiving of the Bible, significant as it is, nevertheless comes as the culmination to a larger allegorical program staged at the conduit at St. Paul’s. While much of this allegory is not included in Heywood’s final scene, the pageantry’s larger symbolic message is still present. A comparison of the historical and fictional pageants will demonstrate this point.
The printed version of Elizabeth’s coronation entry, The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage , provides the most specific details of the pageantry. 143 We are told that as Elizabeth approached the conduit she was presented with two hills, one, to the north, which was “cragged, barreyn and stonye” with a single withered tree, and one, to the south, which was “fayre, freshe, grene and beawtifull” with a healthy tree. Under the north tree sat a man dressed in ragged clothing, mourning, while under the south tree stood a pleasant, well-dressed man. According to the printed report the two antithetical scenes were devised to represent a decayed and a flourishing commonwealth respectively. Read polemically, the first was a symbol of Mary’s England, the second a symbol of what Elizabeth’s England would become. Between the hills stood a cave with a locked door. As Elizabeth approached the cave, a figure representing Time emerged from that door. With him came his daughter Veritas (Truth) carrying a book with the words “ Verbum veritatis ” (Word of Truth). This book—the English Bible— was then passed to the queen, who in turn kissed it and held it to the sky (C3v–C4v).
142 Hester Lees-Jeffries, “Location as Metaphor in Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation Entry (1559): Veritas Temporis Filia ,” The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth , eds. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring and Sarah Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 77–78, 82. 143 STC 7589.5.
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As Germaine Warkentin, the most recent editor of The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage explains, while the proverb of Truth as the daughter of Time had an ancient pedigree, in the sixteenth century it was regularly “exploited by controversialists during the Reformation’s great debate over what constitutes theological truth.” 144 It is this polemical use of the proverb that we see at work in both Elizabeth’s entry and Heywood’s play. Her receiving an English Bible is a reminder of her responsibility to restore Protestantism to a new, flourishing English commonwealth, a commonwealth that for the previous five years decayed under Marian
Catholicism. Thus, to quote Warkentin again, “Truth had been imprisoned in her rock for many years, and Time, in the form of Elizabeth’s accession, had now brought her forth” (63).
In Heywood’s play, the Veritas Temporis Filia pageant is modified, but the spirit of its message remains. 145 Elizabeth proclaims:
VVe thanke you all: but first this booke I kisse.
Thou art the way to honor; thou to blisse,
An English Bible, thankes my good Lord Maior,
You of our bodie and our soule haue care,
This is the Iewell that we still loue best,
This was our solace when we were distrest,
This booke that hath so long conceald it selfe,
So long shut vp, so long hid; now Lords see,
VVe here vnclaspe, for euer it is free:
144 Germaine Warkentin, introduction, The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage and Related Documents, ed. Warkentin (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS), 2004) 62. 145 The following speech is Heywood’s invention. In The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage , Elizabeth is quoted as saying : “Time hath brought me hither” when she first viewed the pageant from afar. When she received the Bible she kissed it, held it to her breast and raised it to the sky before thanking the city. No other words are attributed to her. Warkentin 85, 88.
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VVho lookes for ioy, let him this booke adore,
This is true foode for rich men and for poore,
VVho drinkes of this, is certaine nere to perish,
This will the soule with heauenly vertue cherish,
Lay hand vppon this Anchor euery soule,
Your names shalbe in an eternall scrowle;
VVho builds on this, dwel's in a happy state,
This is the fountaine cleere imaculate,
That happy yssue that shall vs succeed,
And in our populous Kingdome this booke read:
For them as for our owne selues we humbly pray,
They may liue long and blest; so lead the way. (G4r)
Essential to this final moment is not only that Elizabeth recognizes the importance of God’s intervention for her survival, but that she does so via the Christian scriptures. For Protestant playgoers in 1604, Elizabeth’s gesture of kissing the book would have been the ultimate visual articulation of sola scriptura . That the Bible she kisses is an English one is particularly significant given the larger pan-Protestant mandate for making the gospel available in the vernacular. But this moment would have been especially significant in the political-religious climate of early Jacobean London. Following the Hampton Court conference of 1604, when the play was first staged, debates over the importance of the singularity of the scriptures as the basis for determining church liturgy and polity had split Protestants into factions. In other words, while all Protestants may have sympathized with this powerful final moment that recognizes
Elizabeth as a Protestant monarch, Puritan playgoers in particular would have embraced the
78 focus on the Bible as particularly noteworthy. When we consider that Elizabeth appears with her
Bible in various earlier scenes, scenes that often see her evoking Truth, then this final moment makes sense: the unclasping of Truth, the Christian scriptures, functions as an apotheosis, a visual summation of the play’s larger message that Elizabeth’s survival derived largely from her complete devotion to the Christian word. In 1604, this final moment would have functioned less as nostalgia for the late queen, than as counsel for the new Protestant monarch and his church government. Alice Hunt is correct in asserting that in the play the Temporis Veritas Filia pageant “is recalled as a warning.” 146 That warning, repeated in countless puritan pamphlets and petitions, was that only through a total devotion to the scriptures would the reformation of the church be made complete. 147 In 1604, puritans still pondered whether James would respond to the Time and embrace the Truth.
The play’s final pageant scene serves several functions. In looking to Foxe’s story of The
Myraculous Preseruation for its source, the play alerts spectators that its providential narrative is distinctively Protestant, and by ending the play with Elizabeth as queen, holding a new English
Bible, the play offers a visual endorsement of the puritan mandate of sola scriptura . This final moment may also help explain the image of Elizabeth used on the title-page of the first quarto.
Nathaniel Butter’s 1605 quarto of If You Knovv Not Me includes a striking image of the late queen fully bejeweled, sitting on her throne (see Fig. 4). For many critics this image has proven misleading because the play focuses on Elizabeth as princess. But if we consider the title-page’s image in light of the final scene just discussed, then the choice makes sense. As Jean
Howard correctly asserts, the image of the queen on Butter’s first quarto anticipates “Elizabeth’s
146 The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 168. 147 John Watkins offers a similar reading to mine by noting: “Instead of affirming monarchy as an inherently sacred institution, the Bible reminds Elizabeth that she earns her sacred aura by defending Protestantism in all its Gospel purity.” Representing Elizabeth 46.
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FIGURE 4
Title-page to Thomas Heywood, If You Knovv Not Me (London,1605) STC 13328. Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library (call number STC 13328).
80 eventual metamorphosis,” 148 from princess to queen. In light of the puritan politics of 1604, however, that metamorphosis takes on special significance. Not only is Elizabeth the imprisoned subject-princess saved and then made queen, but her transformation stands as an affirmation of the recovery of a religious Truth brought forth by Time. According to this logic, the play’s title,
If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie , is not only a reference to Elizabeth, the most familiar of faces, but also to religious truth. If you know not the Truth (i.e. Protestantism), you know nothing at all.
4. Conclusion
By opting to stage a story of Elizabeth’s formative years as princess, If You Knovv Not
Me deliberately showcased an Elizabeth of distant memory, one that juxtaposed strongly with the aged, iconic figure that Londoners grew so accustomed to seeing in print in the last decades of the sixteenth century. If the play responded to a need to remember Elizabeth, it was because her story as princess was an applicable narrative in 1604: while offering a familiar story of endurance, If You Knovv Not Me also raised controversial questions about the political and constitutional aspects of religious non-conformity. In 1604, political loyalty was the central issue in the non-conformist petitionary literature. Could English subjects hold alternative religious opinions and still have political allegiance to the monarch? Was religion in and of itself grounds for deducing an individual’s thoughts and actions? To consider this previously understudied discursive context alongside the play is to confront a 1604 context that would have been clear to early-Stuart playgoers and readers. As Heywood’s theatregoers watched Princess
Elizabeth, rather than Queen Elizabeth, they also watched an English subject, suffering for her beliefs. In this sense, while the 1604 audience witnessed one of the first plays on a Tudor royal,
148 “Staging the Absent Woman” 267.
81 the story was not a story limited to royalty. This was a story debated, witnessed, and, at times, experienced by the audience members themselves.
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CHAPTER THREE
Tudor Frustrations and Hopes and the Stuart Political-Religious Controversies of 1604–1605 in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me
In the previous chapter, I examined how Thomas Heywood’s If You Knovv Not
Me, You Know No Bodie engaged with political-religious controversies at the forefront of
Stuart culture in 1604–1605. I argued that audience members of the first performances, as well as readers of the first quarto edition of that play, would have spotted in Princess
Elizabeth’s private dilemma—particularly the double allegiance she owed to her Catholic monarch and her Protestant beliefs—public controversies debated from the period in which much of the play was set (1553–1554) right up to the period in which the play was written (1603–1604). In this chapter, I present a related argument for Samuel Rowley’s
When You See Me, You Know Me, a play printed in 1605, the same year as If You Knovv
Not Me. Much of When You See Me surveys the final years of Henry VIII’s reign, including the period he was married to Jane Seymour (1536–1539), and especially the period he was married to Katherine Parr (1543–1547). During these years, Henry supervised the drafting of a wide range of acts, proclamations and statements on
England’s official religious policy. Some of these state measures endorsed traditional pre-Reformation beliefs, while others supported new Lutheran-inspired doctrines, the result being a heterodox religious policy that was re-defined on a yearly, at times on a monthly, basis. Fifteen years after Henry’s death John Foxe commented on this period in his Actes and Monuments (1563). In addition to celebrating Henry VIII’s decision to break from Rome, Foxe contemplated the reasons for Henry’s more traditionlist policies.
Henry’s agenda on religious matters, Foxe argued, did not reflect the king’s own personal faith; specific government acts such as The Act of Six Articles (1539), or The
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Aduancement of True Religion (1543) were, rather, the work of powerful factions.
Indeed, the only reason the Reformation succeeded in England, according to Foxe, was because the faction led by Thomas Cranmer and other committed reformers eventually won over the king.
When You See Me adopts this Foxean emphasis on faction and influence, what
Julia Gasper has described as the play’s “contention between the adherents [to] and the opponents of the Reformation for control of the King.” 149 In the play, there are two factions that attend the king and vie for his attention: the traditionalist faction led by
Stephen Gardiner and Princess Mary, and the reformist faction led by Thomas Cranmer,
Prince Edward, Katherine Parr, and Will Sommers. The play is, in a significant part, a debate between these two groups and the ideas they represent. The debates may be conducted by Tudor royals and nobles, but they reflect the political-religious disputes made by divines in early Stuart culture. Henry’s reluctance to reform the nation’s ecclesiastical polity, as portrayed in the play, would have resonated with Rowley’s
English readers, since by 1605 they had already witnessed two years of infighting over the definition of the nation’s official stance on religion. James’s refusal to reform the
Elizabethan church’s doctrine, discipline and governance was a disappointment for reformers who pleaded with the king to rid the church of its “Romish” elements. James’s unwillingness to support a new program of ecclesiastical reforms led some contemporaries to question, even criticize, his religious commitments. Although When
You See Me concentrates on the later years of Henry VIII’s reign, the controversies at the heart of the play reflect ones present in early Stuart culture.
149 “The Reformation Plays on the Public Stage,” Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts , eds. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 199.
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This chapter considers how a fictional treatment of the final years of Henry VIII’s reign engages with the political-religious debates of 1603–1605, particularly the events leading up to, during, and following the Hampton Court Conference. I concentrate on
Rowley’s portrayal of two key figures from the king’s inner circle, Queen Katherine Parr and Prince Edward. In their words and actions, these two reform-minded characters engage in a set of controversies equally relevant to 1545 and to 1605. Katherine Parr’s commitment to defending a reformed theology, and the subsequent troubles she faces as a result of her conviction, echo the commitment and experiences of puritan delegates at the
Hampton Court Conference, and the language used by Reformist divines in the pamphlet literature of 1604. If Katherine exhibits the frustration felt by both Tudor evangelicals and Stuart reformists, Prince Edward, the symbol of greater reformation, embodies the hope that Protestantism will be implemented, or at least tolerated, by the ecclesiastical establishment. That Rowley expected his readers to see a parallel between the Tudor and
Stuart Princes of Wales is likely. The quarto title-page identifies the play as being performed by Prince Henry’s men, and there is evidence to suggest that it may have been staged as a private performance before the Prince. 150 But the most striking parallel between Tudor and Stuart Princes is to be found in the play’s rhetoric of praise for the heir apparent. As I will demonstrate in the final section of this chapter, Rowley’s
150 The play was likely performed at the Fortune shortly after the re-opening of the theatres in 1604, but it may also have been staged as a private performance for King James’s son, Prince Henry, in 1604–1605. Manuscript records for unnamed plays performed before Prince Henry are discussed in Andrew Gurr, Shakespearean Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 255–256. For a further discussion of the implications of staging Edward, Tudor Prince of Wales for Henry, Stuart Prince of Wales, see Mark H. Lawhorn, “Taking Pains for the Prince: Age, Patronage, and Penal Surrogacy in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me ,” The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1450–1650 , ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS), 2002) 131–132. The first quarto of the play was entered in the register of the Stationers’ Company on 12 February 1605. The title- page to that edition reads, “When You See Me, You Know Me, Or the Famous Chronicle Historie of King Henry the Eight, with the Birth and Vertuous Life of Edward Prince of Wales As it was Playd by the High and Mightie Prince of Wales his Seruants ” (London, 1605) STC 21417.
85 characterization of Edward as the future hope for religious reform to the English church reflected the language used by writers to describe the young Prince Henry in early Stuart dedications. Audience members of the first performances and readers of the 1605 quarto of When You See Me were being asked to consider the play’s historical subject in relation to current Stuart political-religious controversies, and the debates and concerns experienced by Katherine Parr and Prince Edward brought this connection between past and present to the forefront.
1) Rowley’s Literary-Historical Vision
Criticism of When You See Me has repeatedly pointed to Rowley’s mixing of events from
1514 to 1546. At the close of the nineteenth century, A.W. Ward characterized the play as “a bewildering jumble of transposed history and rollicking invention,” while over a century later, Mark H. Lawhorn alerted readers of the play to the fact that Cardinal
Wolsey is still alive in the final scene, when “he ought to have been dead and buried for sixteen years by the time Bishop Gardiner brought charges against Katherine Parr.” 151 It is easy to fault the play for its supposedly careless attention to historical chronology and detail, but in doing so we ignore the fact that early modern English history plays often take great liberty with the representation of time, events and characters. 152 By using chronology or linearity as the basis for measuring what qualifies as good history, we examine the early modern according to modern expectations. Early modern history −as chronicle, as poetry, or as drama −could be structured in various ways, sequential narrative being but one option. If we accept, therefore, that Rowley’s historical structure
151 A History of English Dramatic Literature , 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1899) 2: 548; Lawhorn 132. 152 Gasper, “The Reformation Plays” 190–191.
86 is “intentional historical inaccuracy” 153 then it is modern ignorance that conceives of it as a “bewildering jumble”. If we try to imagine the play in early modern terms, it becomes, as Marsha S. Robinson astutely points out, a “telescoping [of] the Henrician Reformation to create a Foxean history of Catholic usurpation.”154 In Rowley’s historical vision, time is arranged to conform to a Protestant polemical schema. Rather than fixate on the historical inaccuracies present in When You See Me, we need to examine closely the kinds of historical situations that predominate throughout the play, and the sources
Rowley turned to for his literary-historical vision. Only then may we consider how the play would have registered with audiences in 1604–1605.
Anachronistic and episodic, When You See Me nevertheless is consistent in its attention to political-religious controversy. This political-religious focus begins early in the play, as Cardinal Wolsey’s dream of an “election to the papall throne” (A2r) is made to undermine the loyalty he owes his English sovereign, Henry VIII. With all the bravado of a Marlovian villain, Wolsey schemes and strategizes from the play’s start to its end. The first time we encounter the Cardinal, he brags and boasts how he is able to outwit both Henry and the political network that supports him:
That vnder culloure of aduising him,
I ouerrule both Counsell, Court, and King:
Let him command, but we will execute.
Making our glorie to out-shine his fame
Till we haue purchast an eternall name. (A3v)
153 F. Nostbakken, “Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me : Political Drama in Transition,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 47 (1995): 72. 154 Writing the Reformation: Actes and Monuments and the Jacobean History Play (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002) 14.
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More than any other character in the play, Wolsey evokes the spirit of evil ambition. As
Joseph Candido notes, “There is something chilling, even faintly dehumanizing, in the distilled purity of the cardinal’s rationality.” 155 And yet, despite his apparent villainy,
Wolsey’s political desires are not entirely separate from the religious beliefs and affiliations championed by others throughout the play. For instance, while the Cardinal strategizes over how to become the next pope, a powerful faction of religious traditionalists voice their desire for a restored English Catholic church. In this biased, pro-Protestant work, both acts are conceived as emanating from a similar agenda bent on stopping the Reformation from succeeding in England. The anachronistic and episodic nature of Rowley’s play is the result of its binary structure. This divided world is most prevalent in the second half of the play, especially after the appearance of Katherine Parr.
With the introduction of the new queen, the play increasingly engages with religious matters, by forcing audiences to ask questions about the crown’s right to oversee ecclesiastical matters, about the legitimacy of certain theological doctrines, and about the subject’s right to hold religious beliefs that differ from those sanctioned by the state. In the scenes involving Katherine, the play foregrounds the political-religious concerns of both the 1540s and 1604–5.
2) Defining Heresy in When You See Me, You Know Me
When the traditionalist Stephen Gardiner defends the traditional interpretation of the mass, or the evangelical Katherine Parr scoffs at the doctrine of purgatory, each
155 “Fashioning Henry VIII: What Shakespeare saw in When You See Me You Know Me ,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 23 (1983): 48.
88 defines his or her personal religious beliefs in relation to God and the state. In When You
See Me, characters define their opinions on religion as a form of allegiance. Near the end of the play, Gardiner and Bonner engage in a lively debate with Katherine Parr before the king. Ultimately this debate centres on the ways in which personal belief impinges on public duty. Parr and Gardiner attempt to persuade the king of their different theological positions. Parr’s initial questions place the traditionalists Bonner and Gardiner on the defensive:
Queen. Pray tell me, why would ye make the King beleeue,
His Highnesse and the people vnder him,
Are tyde so strictly to obay the Pope?
Bon. Because faire Queene he is Gods Deputie.
Queen. So are all Kings; and God himselfe commaunds
The King to rule, and people to obay,
And both to loue and honour him:
But you that are sworne seruants vnto Rome,
How are ye faithfull subiects to the King,
When first ye serue the Pope then after him?
Gard. Madame these are that sectes of Lutherans,
That makes your Highnesse so mistake the Scriptures,
Your slender arguments thus aunswered
Before the King, God must be worshipped.
Queen. Tis true, but pray ye answere this:
Suppose, the King by Proclamation,
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Commaunded you, and euery of his subiects,
To spurne against the Popes authoritie:
Yee know the Scripture binds yee to obey him,
But this I thinke, if that his Grace did so,
Your slight obedience all the world should know.
King. Gods-mother Kate, thoust toucht them there. (H2v–H3r)
When the queen critiques the illegitimacy of papal authority, she easily gains the approval of the king. Rowley’s characterization of the king accords with history, for after the establishment of the royal supremacy in 1534, Henry remained firmly committed to denouncing the pope’s ecclesiastical authority over the realm of England. But the queen is clear that the traditionalist position is more than a matter of theological preference: it is a political choice. As noted in Chapter One, the statutes of 1533–1534 were clear that
English subjects who acknowledged the pope’s authority relinquished the allegiance they owed their English king. The queen’s final imagined supposition, one that sees Gardiner and Bonner refusing to take an oath against the pope, imagines theological positioning in such political terms. This debate over political obedience was very much alive in Stuart
London in 1604–1605, as the newly formed government returned to the controversial subject of religious uniformity. Both Catholic recusants and Puritans repeatedly questioned the state’s right to enforce English subjects to conform to an institutionalized set of religious beliefs, while critiquing the suggestion that religious unorthodoxy represented an act of disloyalty. These concerns are at the heart of Katherine’s ordeals.
Feeling now that she has the upper hand in the debate, the queen becomes braver in voicing her theological principles.
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Queen . Pray tell the King then, what Scripture haue yee,
To teach religion in an vnknowne language?
Instruct the ignorant to kneele to Saints,
By bare-foote pilgrimage to visite shrines,
For mony to release from Purgatorie,
The vildest villaine, theefe, or murderer,
All this the people must beleeue you can,
Such is the dregs of Romes religion. (H3r) 156
The queen catalogues some of the most familiar Protestant critiques against Roman
Catholicism, including keeping the Bible in Latin, praying to saints, and attending shrines. Many of the queen’s arguments are ones that Henry historically supported. It is not so much what the queen says at this point, but what, as Gardiner notes, those speeches invoke:
Gard . I, those are the speeches of those hereticks,
Cranmer, Ridley , and blunt Lattimer,
That dayly raile against his Hollynesse,
Filling the land with hatefull heresies. (H3r)
Gardiner rebukes Katherine by connecting her beliefs to the views expounded by controversial reformist preachers such as Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. Previously
156 Katherine’s familiar reformist defense of sola scriptura , her charge to Gardiner to “Pray tell the King then, what Scripture haue yee,” follows closely with the events of 1545–1546. In those years the laws permitting full public access to the Bible were revoked. Therefore, when read historically, Katherine’s first challenge could be interpreted as directed as much towards the king as it is to Gardiner. Moreover, David Starkey suggests that Katherine’s “troubles” with the king came shortly after the publication of Katherine’s key reformist texts, including her Prayers or meditacions (1545) and her commission of the English edition of Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the New Testament. See David Starkey, Six Wives.The Queens of Henry VIII (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003) 753–758.
91 in control of the debate, Katherine exits the scene feeling anxious over the theological positions she previously promoted.
Quee . Nay be not angry, nor mistake them Lords,
What they haue said or done, was mildly followed,
As by their Articles are euident.
King . Where are those Articles Kate?
Quee . Ile goe and fetch them to your Maiestie,
And pray your Highnesse view them gratiously. (H3r)
At the moment she enters the play, Katherine Parr is defiant in upholding her religious beliefs. The first time she speaks it is to defend herself against Henry’s characterization of her “Lutheran” tendencies (F2v). In ensuing scenes, the queen defends others who share her religious commitments, even when it means standing up to the king himself. These defenses often gain the king’s respect. And for much of the scene just cited, it would appear that Henry is in agreement with Katherine’s opinions on theology. However, as soon as Gardiner associates Katherine with others’ heretical ideas, Henry becomes increasingly suspicious of her beliefs. Henry’s actions in the play accord with Foxe’s characterization of the king as a leader who responds to others’ wishes, rather than following his own instincts. Indeed, these scenes are based on details found only in Actes and Monuments. 157 In The Storie of Queene Katherine Parre Late
Queene, and Wife to King Henry 8. Wherein Appeareth in what Daunger she was for the
157 Neither Holinshed’s Chronicles nor Stow’s Annals reprints the story.
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Gospell, by the Meanes of Steuen Gardiner and Other of his Conspiracy: and how
Graciously she was Preserued by her Kind and Louing Husband the King (see Fig. 5), 158
Foxe explains how Henry
was informed that Queene Katherine Parre, at that time his wife, was very
much giuen to the reading and study of the holy scriptures: & that she for
that purpose had retained diuers well learned and godly persons, to instruct
her throughly in the same, w t whom as at al times conuenient she vsed to
haue priuate conference touching spiritual matters:
Moreover, Foxe explains how daily the queen’s chaplains
made some collation to her and to her Ladies and Gentlewomen of her
priuie Chamber, or other that were disposed to heare: in which sermons,
they oft times touched suche abuses as in the churche then were rife.
Which things as they were not secretely done, so neyther were their
preachings vnknowen vnto the Kynge. Wherof at the first, and for a great
time, he semed very wel to like. Which made her ye more bold (being in
deed become very zealous toward the Gospell, and the professors therof)
franckly to debate with the king, touching Religion, and therein flatly to
discouer her selfe: oftetimes wishing, exhorting and perswading the king,
that as hee had to the glorye of God and hys eternall fame, begonne a good
158 For discussions of Foxe’s account, see Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr. The Making of a Queen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) 257–61; Starkey, Six Wives 760–765; Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic, the Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) 231–237. For different interpretations of Rowley’s use of Foxe’s story of Katherine Parr, see Marsha S. Robinson, Writing the Reformation: Actes and Monuments and the Jacobean History Play (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 133–135, and Kim H. Noling, “Woman’s Wit and Woman’s Will in When You See Me, You Know Me,” SEL 33.2 (1993): 336–338.
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and a godlye woorke in banishinge that monsterous Idolle of Rome, so he
would throughly perfite and finish the same, cleansing and purging hys
Churche of Englande, cleane from the dregges therof, wherin as yet
remained great superstition. (3Q1r)
Katherine’s views on religion continued to be well received by the king, until, Foxe tells us, Stephen Gardiner and others sought “(for the furtheraunce of theyr vngodly purpose) to reuiue, stirre vp and kindle euil and pernicious humours in their Prince . . . to depryue her of thys great fauour . . . [and] stoppe the passage of the Gospell” (3Q1r). Gardiner, we are told, was able to accomplish all this by persuading Henry that Katherine’s beliefs stood in opposition to the official royal policy, and “that the Religion by the Queene so stifly maintained, did not onely disallow and dissolue the pollicie and politicke gouernment of Princes, but also taught the people that all thynges oughte to be in cōmon ” (3Q1r). For Gardiner, the reformist position undermines the very legitimacy of political-religious authority; therefore Henry, who concurs with Gardiner’s logic, is justified in suspecting the queen of treason. In When You See Me, Rowley relies on the language and ideas of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, even though he alters and appropriates each in significant ways. Katherine’s critique of Catholic belief and ceremony follows Foxe. Although Katherine directs her views to the king alone in
Foxe’s narrative account, and to the king, Gardiner and Bonner in the play, the order in which she presents her ideas matches closely the sequence found in Actes and
Monuments .
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FIGURE 5
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1583) STC 11225, vol 2. 3Q1r. Reproduced with permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (call number foxe f 00004).
95
In the play, Katherine questions the legitimacy of the pope’s authority in England before turning to a criticism of Rome’s religion. Similarly, in Foxe’s Actes and
Monuments , Katherine applauds the king first for “banishinge that monsterous Idolle of
Rome,” before telling him that the church still needs to be cleansed of the “dregges” of
“superstition.” In both the Foxean narrative and Rowley’s play, Katherine gets in trouble at the moment her beliefs are interpreted as threats to the king’s authority. In both instances, that threat is articulated to the king by Stephen Gardiner, the head of the traditionalist faction.
One of the implications of Rowley’s use of Foxe as a source is that he inherited an interpretation of Henry’s reign that deflected the responsibility for the nation’s idiosyncratic religious policies from the king to the state officials, ecclesiasts and queens who advised him. John Foxe made his case for the factionalist argument as early as
1563, in the first edition of his Actes and Monuments . Twenty years later, in the fourth and final authorized edition of the work, Foxe remained committed to his interpretation.
To many which be yet aliue, & can testifie these thinges, it is not
vnknowne, how variable the state of Religi ō stood in these daies: how
hardly and with what difficulty it came forth: what chaunces and chaunges
it suffered. Euen as ye king was ruled and gaue eare sometime to one,
some time to an other, so one while it went forward, at an other season as
much backeward agayne, and sometime clean altered & changed for a
season, according as they could preuayle which were about the king.
(3G1v) 159
159 The 1583 edition was the last to be edited by Foxe. The 1596 fifth edition, the most recent edition Rowley could have had access to, is largely a reprint of the 1583 edition.
96
Foxe’s conception of Henry’s reign as a political battle between opposing factions, for the king’s attention, fits within the dualistic structure that characterizes his martyrology: one that envisions all worldly struggle as a battle between good and evil for a single truth.
Foxe’s interpretation of Henry’s religious policies, as well as his argument for the
English Reformation in general, has endured for centuries in part because it made sense of a king who denounced the pope’s authority but upheld essential doctrines of traditional religion, a king who implemented a heterodox religious policy. 160 This interpretation of
Henry as a misguided king at the hands of greedy factions allowed Foxe to argue for a traditionalist conspiracy, even though his case depended on a careful selection of events from 1537 to 1546. Alec Ryrie summarizes this strategy nicely:
Foxe argued that Henry VIII was little more than a reluctant accomplice to
crimes committed by court conservatives, in particular Gardiner. This was
a most useful fiction. Foxe could scarcely have ignored Henry’s
persecution of evangelicals, even if he had wished to do so. But nor could
he condemn the old king outright; it would have meant rejecting Henry’s
real contributions to the evangelical cause, and undermining the
legitimacy of the Elizabethan church. 161
160 For an overview of the historiography of Henry’s reign, see Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, “Introduction, Protestantism and Their Beginnings,” The Beginnings of English Protestantism , eds. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 1–13. In recent decades there has been a serious backlash to the “factionalist” argument. Increasingly, critics regard Henry as an active participant in the making of England’s religious policy, rather than a passive intermediary who carried out the wishes of others. See G.W. Bernard, “The Making of Religious Policy 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way,” The Historical Journal 41.2 (1998): 321–349. This argument is pursued at more length in Bernard’s The King's Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 161 The Gospel and Henry VIII, Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 17.
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Indeed, those contributions are captured in the most powerful page of Foxe’s section on
Henry: the overpowering woodcut of Henry holding the pope under foot while he receives the English Bible (see Fig. 6). In this reworking of the title-page iconography used for the Great Bible of 1539, the king is shown defending England’s reformed religious policy. The portrait visualizes the royal supremacy itself. 162 But the printed narrative offers a different relationship, one that portrays Henry not as the architect behind the English Reformation but as a king acting as the “councilor’s puppet.” 163
Image and word do not tell the same story. Rowley’s When You See Me is more aligned to the Foxean word. The play does not defend Henry’s reputation as a Reformation monarch; instead, it focuses on the factions that shape official royal policy and those who suffer for holding opposing religious beliefs.
3) Topical Parallels: Stuart Political-Religious Controversies
Contemporary readers of When You See Me may not have recognized in the scenes involving Katherine Parr the exact details of the source Rowley used for his play, but they would have found in the debate between the queen and Stephen Gardiner before
King Henry, especially in their comments over church doctrine and discipline, familiar scenarios recently played out at Hampton Court. Rowley’s treatment of Queen
Katherine’s troubles reflects the difficulties experienced by non-conformists at the
Hampton Court Conference. For audiences of 1604, this play of the Tudor past functioned as a direct and timely commentary on the dominant political-religious
162 For discussion the Great Bible title-page, see Tatiana C. String, “Henry VIII’s Illuminated Great Bible,” Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institute 59 (1996): 319–324 and David Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 205–208. 163 Ryrie, Gospel 17.
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FIGURE 6
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1583), STC 11225, vol. 2, 3A2r. Reproduced with permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (call number foxe f 00004). 99 controversy of early Stuart England. In the play, Katherine Parr challenges the scriptural warrant for legitimacy of pilgrimages and purgatory, whereas at the Hampton Court
Conference the puritan ministers questioned, for example, the biblical precedent for the crossing at baptism and the wearing of certain ceremonial attire. Both the fictionalized
Tudor queen and the historic Stuart divines pose similar questions on obedience and loyalty in their consideration of the legitimacy of particular beliefs, ceremonies and other related practices sanctioned by the state.
In January 1604, one question dominated the events leading up to, at, and following the Hampton Court Conference: although the king and his bishops were responsible for defining an official position on religion, need subjects conform to it?
Given the nature of the petitions sent to James in the lead-up to the conference, debate over religious conformity was to be expected; however, just how the king would respond to non-conformists’ pleas for tolerance was less predictable.
King James called the Hampton Court Conference with the intention of reaching a consensus on the nation’s ecclesiology policy and doctrine. Between April 1603 and
January 1604, when the conference was held, James received a number of petitions calling for a reformation to England’s policies on church doctrine and discipline. The program for the four-day conference devised by the king and his bishops addressed the concerns and issues raised in a number of these petitions, particularly ones written by disaffected puritan ministers. One of the most important petitions delivered to James as he journeyed south from Scotland in April 1603 towards his new home at Westminster was The Millenary Petition , named because of its being allegedly signed by more than a thousand ministers. The aim of the petition was to inspire the king to reform certain
100 ceremonies and “abuses” in the church. The petition, divided into four sections, recommended that the “common burden of humane Rites and Ceremonies . . . . be eased and relieved” (A1v).164 Such calls to remove or to reform the “Romish” ceremonies outlined in the Book of Common Prayer, and requests to limit the power of the bishops, were far from new. Queen Elizabeth repeatedly heard such request throughout her forty- four year reign. Now those who had been dissatisfied with the nation’s ecclesiastical polity under Elizabeth were optimistic that the new Stuart king might bring about the changes they had long desired. These ministers were careful in how they addressed the king. They were well aware of the barrage of criticism over church governance, doctrine, and discipline that James faced from Presbyterian ministers during his years as King of
Scotland. 165 The writers of the Millenary Petition insisted that, while they petitioned as
“Ministers of the Gospel in this land,” they did not write as
factious men affecting a popular Paritie in the Church, nor as Schismatikes
ayming at the dissolution of the state Ecclesiasticall; but as the faithfull
servants of Christ, and loyall subiects to your Maiestie, desiring and
longing for the redresse of diverse abuses of the Church. (A1r–v)
This important qualification, one that insisted on their loyalty to the king, was an attempt to dissociate these latest petitions from earlier Tudor separatist calls for reform. If these ministers requested an end to the crossing in baptism, bowing at the name of Christ, and wearing garments like the cap and surplice, all because these ceremonies were not
164 I quote from the earliest printing of the petition found in The Ansvvere…of…the Vniversitie of Oxford (Oxford, 1603) STC 19012. 165 See W.B. Patterson , King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom . Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 1–30.
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“agreeable to the scriptures,” they claimed to do so in total loyalty to the king. Their requests came not as “a disorderly innovation, but a due and godly Reformation” (A3r).
The ministers suggested that their recommendations might be discussed in more detail by conference. The king, who was already petitioning for his own pan-European council to discuss church matters, may have considered this as an opportunity to achieve religious consensus on the domestic front. 166 Whatever James’s initial reaction might have been, he called for a conference to be held in the autumn of 1603. As with the delayed royal entry, however, the plague of 1603 forced the postponement of the conference, which finally took place outside the city, several months later, at Hampton
Court.
Between the signing of the Millenary Petition in April 1603 and the conference in
January 1604, puritan ministers circulated letters and other proposals (many of which were less diplomatic then the Millenary Petition) to help gain support for their forthcoming complaints. 167 Their attempts did not go unnoticed by the king, who met with his privy council and issued a proclamation on 24 October 1603 “concerning such as seditiously seeke reformation in church matters.” James was particularly upset over the
“Inuectiues” and unlawful “subscriptions” produced in recent months, all of which he described as the actions of those in support of “tumult, sedition and violence.” James interpreted these calls for reformation as unlawful—as beliefs and opinions that undermined his political authority, while also posing a potential threat to the stability of church and state. As is the case with Gardiner’s response to Katherine in Rowley’s play,
James also emphasized how these petitions were made as the source of concern. James
166 King James VI and I 31–74. 167 A number of these manuscript petitions are reproduced and discussed in Roland G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church , 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1910) 1:285–309.
102 proceeded to make it clear that his goal was to preserve England’s ecclesiastical polity, and to reform only “abuses which we shall apparently finde proued.” 168 If this proclamation formed a prelude to the conference, it was not a good omen for the puritan case.
4) The Hampton Court Conference
The complaints outlined in the Millenary Petition formed the program for the
Hampton Court Conference in January 1604. Our knowledge of the proceedings derives from a series of printed and manuscript sources, the fullest of which is a printed quarto entitled, The Svmme and Svbstance of the Conference. . . Contracted by VVilliam
Barlovv.169 Barlow’s account has been described as biased towards the arguments produced by the bishops and the king. If Svmme and Svbstance is, as Patrick Collinson notes, “a skillfully tendentious piece of propaganda,” it is nevertheless the fullest account we have of the four-day conference, and therefore one we must consult if we wish to study it. 170
The most controversial section of Barlow’s account relates to the second day’s proceedings, the day during which the Puritan representatives presented the king their recommendations for ecclesiastical reform. Barlow describes the event as an
“Interlocutory Conference” (A3r), a formal setup that resembles the form of the debate
168 STC 8336. See also Larkin & Hughes, 1:60–63. 169 The full title reads, The Svmme and Svbstance of the Conference which, it Pleased his Excellent Maiestie to haue with the Lords, Bishops, and Other of his Clergie, (at vvhich the Most of the Lordes of the Councell were Present) in his Maiesties Priuy-Chamber, at Hampton Court. Ianuary 14. 1603. / Contracted by VVilliam Barlovv, Doctor of Diuinity, and Deane of Chester. Whereunto are Added, Some Copies, (Scattered Abroad,) Vnsauory, and Vntrue (London, 1604) STC 1456.5. 170 “The Jacobean Religious Settlement: The Hampton Court Conference, ” Before the English Civil War. Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government , ed. Howard Tomlinson (London: MacMillan Press, 1983) 37.
103 held between Katherine and Gardiner before King Henry in the play. The formal arrangement was, according to Barlow, one in which puritan ministers and traditionalist bishops exchanged positions before their presiding king. But an even stronger parallel between the fictional scene in When You See Me and the historical event is found in the bishops’ and the king’s interpretation of the puritan recommendations. Ultimately, the king declares these recommendations unworthy of debate, or to be obstinate challenges to the state.
A master rhetorician, James often turns to the words from the Millenary Petition to defend the current status of worship. He promises that he will act the part of the physician and only cure rather than alter the body of the church (B3r), amend abuses, but by no means make significant changes to the church liturgy and governance (D3r), as it is better to have “a Church with some faults, then an Innouation” (G4r). James’s defenses of the existing English religious policy are always made through reference to the scriptures or Church Fathers, a reminder that the king’s argument proceeds from the puritan insistence on the written word. 171 Time and again the king listens to the critiques made by the puritan ministers on issues such as confirmation and private baptism, cites a biblical or patristic passage to refute the said claim, and then reasserts the legitimacy of the current church policy. The puritan complaints get dismantled one by one, and are often backed by assertions of authority such as James’s aphorism, “ No Bishop, No King ”
(F2r). Even when James agrees with the puritan ministers’ recommendations, such as their request for a new translation of the Bible, James finds a way to agree through disagreement. For instance, the king suggests that the Geneva Bible (a translation
171 For conformist and reformist positions and methods of argumentation, see Charles W.A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 4–5.
104 typically connected to puritanism) is the “worst of all” translations, particularly because of its marginal notes, some of which he believes sanction disobedience to kings (G3v–
G4r). Even though in theory James presides over a democratic process of open dialogue at the Hampton Court Conference, what we remember from Barlow’s account is James’s total control of the event. As the second day comes to a close, the king ends with the ultimate message to the Puritan delegates: “If this bee al . . . I shall make the[m] conforme themselues, or I wil harrie them out of the land, or else doe worse” (M2r). The time for negotiating had come to a close. Government fiat would rule. 172
Historians often disagree in their interpretations of James’s actions at the
Hampton Court Conference. For some he is a conciliatory king open to puritan requests, while others see an absolutist monarch unwilling to budge on church reform. These mixed opinions derive, in part, from the survival of different narrative accounts of the event. For instance, Barlow’s account deliberately refuses fully to chronicle the puritan position. Fortunately, his selective account is compensated for through other surviving printed and manuscript accounts and pamphlets responding to the event or to its issues. 173
To look at these sources not only allows us to see an alternative interpretation of this conference, but also gives us a better sense of puritan positions on the issues of religious tolerance and political allegiance.
172 The Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall , which was published months later in May 1604, enforced the conformist agenda. Moreover, all English clergymen were forced to subscribe to these articles or else be deprived of their ministries. Prior, Defining 65–112 discusses the immediate reception of the Constitutions and Canons . 173 See especially M. H. Curtis, “Hampton Court Conference and its Aftermath,” History 46 (1961): 1–16; Frederick Shriver, “Hampton Court Re-visted: James I and the Puritans,” JEH 33.1 (1982): 48–71; Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts. A Political History of England , 2nd ed. (London and New York: Longman: 1999) 53–63; Collinson, “The Jacobean Religious Settlement” 27–51; Alan Stewart, The Cradle King. James VI and I (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003) 191–205.
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Laurence Chaderton, one of the four puritan representatives at the conference, presents an important case study for measuring the reformist stance towards religious policy c. 1604. Peter Lake has examined Chaderton’s manuscript notes while Arnold
Hunt has discussed the marginalia found in a series of books once owned by the divine, including a copy of Barlow’s Svmme and Svbstance .174 These private notes offer insights into the mind of a man who, over his 104 years, witnessed religious upheavals from
Henry VIII’s reign to the end of Charles’s reign. For Peter Lake, Chaderton is the quintessential moderate puritan, that is, one who despite his advocacy of dissenting religious beliefs willingly conformed to government demands. The manuscript notes from certain surviving books once belonging to Chaderton remind us of the private conviction behind the public persona. Hunt’s study of Chaderton’s annotations shows how difficult it is to classify individuals like Chaderton. While he remained committed to puritan ideals, he often disagreed vehemently with his more radical brethren, while occasionally agreeing with the conformist line. If the early Stuart political-religious controversies were largely a battle between conformists and reformists, there were always men like Chaderton who reached a balance between personal faith and public duty.
5) Katherine’s Obedience to Her King
As a case study, Chaderton captures some of the difficulties Katherine faces as her religious beliefs come into conflict with the duty she owes her prince. The next time
174 For discussion of the manuscript notes of Laurence Chadderton, see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 243–261; for Chaderton’s annotated books, including his marginalia on Barlow’s Svmme and Svbstance , see Arnold Hunt, “Laurence Chaderton and the Hampton Court Conference,” Belief and Practice in Reformation England. A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from His Students , eds. Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) 207–228.
106 we encounter Katherine in the play, she is distraught, for she has just received news about the warrant for her arrest. Speaking with Prince Edward in private, she relays the details of the accusations, “Here they accuse me of conspiracie, / That I with Cranmer, Lutimer and Ridley, / Doo seeke to raise rebellion in the state, / Alter religion, and bring Luther in,
/ And to new gouernment inforce the king” (I2r). William Compton, who discusses the matter with the queen, confirms the reports, and tells her to prepare for her imprisonment in the Tower. It is only because of the young Prince Edward’s impassioned pleas to
Henry that Katherine gets to plead her innocence before the king. When she arrives, the king shows little remorse: “How now, what doe you weepe and kneele, / Dus your blacke soule the gylte of conscience feele, / Out, out, your a traytor.” (I4r) Realizing her life hangs in the balance, Katherine declares her eternal loyalty:
Queen. A traytor, O you all seeing powres,
Here witnesse to my Lord my loyalty
A traytor. O then you are too mercifull,
If I haue treason in me, why rip ye not
My vgly hart out with your weapons poynt,
O my good Lord, If it haue traytors blood,
It will be black, deformd, and tenibrous,
If not, from it will spring a scarlet fountaine,
And spit defiance in their periurde throates
That haue accusde me to your maiesty,
Making my state thus full of misery. (I4r)
107
Significantly, Katherine refuses to condemn the king, her monarch and husband, but instead targets others who have accused her. In line with Foxe’s factionalist interpretation of the reign, Rowley is clear that Katherine’s dilemma is the result of traditionalist informants who have misguided the king. Henry, still not convinced by
Katherine’s appeal, continues: “Haue you not oft maintained arguments, / Euen to our face against religion: / Which ioynd with other complots show it selfe, / As it is gathered by our loyall subiects, / For treason Cappitall against our person” (I4r). Henry presents a two-part question, and the first part proves to be the ultimate obstacle for the queen. For while she promises the king “If euer thought of ill against your maiestie, / Was harbord here refuse me gratious God” (I4r), and later, “If I am false, heauen strike me sodainly”
(I4 v), these pleas do not answer his question. Indeed, Katherine stoops to the king’s authority, claiming “My puny schollership is helde too weake / To maintaine proofes about religion” (I4v). In the end, Katherine convinces the king of her innocence and escapes execution. But this happy ending for the queen does not bring closure. From her initial debate with Gardiner, to her eventual reconciliation with King Henry, Katherine struggles to balance matters of private conscience with those of public duty. Rowley’s contemporaries would have seen in Katherine’s dilemmas reminders of the experiences of the Puritans at the Hampton Court Conference. The right to discuss religious beliefs that differed from those sanctioned by the state continued to be one of the dominant subjects in print in 1604 and 1605. It is to those works, the final context for interpreting
Rowley’s scenes involving Katherine Parr, that we shall now turn.
3d) The Reformist and Conformist Divide
108
While Chaderton registered his criticisms in his manuscript notes and marginalia, others voiced their feelings in the more public medium of print. Henry Jacob provides a case in point. According to Stephen Wright, Jacob, who was living in London by June
1603, “led the puritan campaign to influence the new King James in the direction of a fundamental reform of religion by such means as the famous Millenary Petition which he helped to draw up.” 175 Jacob’s Reasons Taken out of Gods Word (1604) presents the familiar Puritan argument “that Gods written Word ought to be our sole warrant for all things Ecclesiasticall” (A3r), and the source for correcting “great disorders . . . in our
Churches” (A3v). Jacob cited James’s own encouragement in the Basilikon Doron for those dissatisfied with ecclesiastical matters to present their dissatisfaction through reasonable arguments as justification for his decision to dedicate his work to the king.
But Jacob’s plea for the king to “suffer these words of exhortation” (A4r) did not sit well with the authorities, and he was imprisoned shortly after the work was released. 176
What separated men like Henry Jacob from Laurence Chaderton was the way they composed their arguments. Despite Chaderton’s private feelings on the conference, he was largely interested in greater tolerance, particularly the right for ministers and their congregations to alter or ignore the church ceremonies that conflicted with their beliefs.
And yet Chaderton repeatedly bowed to the state’s demands for outward conformity because of the value he placed on the preservation of his ministry. Jacob was unwilling to do this, at least in 1604. Instead, Jacob asked James to reform the church’s
175 ODNB . 176 Reasons Taken out of Gods Word and the Best Humane Testimonies Proving a Necessitie of Reforming our Churches in England ([Middelburg], 1604) STC 14338. For similar arguments to Jacob’s, see William Bradshaw, A Shorte Treatise, Of the Crosse in Baptisme (Amsterdam [i.e. London], 1604) STC 3526–3527, and A Treatise of Divine Worship ([Middelburg], 1604) STC 3528.
109 ecclesiastical structure, and argued that for the king not to do so would jeopardize the very legitimacy of the nation’s religion. Jacob’s assertions exceeded Chaderton’s defense of the right to non-conformity. While both men assisted with the writing of the Millenary
Petition, and both men held puritan attitudes, it is not surprising that the moderate
Chaderton, rather than Jacob, was invited as one of the four puritan delegates to the
Hampton Court Conference. Still, even the more diplomatic Chaderton challenged
England’s religious policies, and for some, including William Covell, criticism of the nation’s church hierarchy was intolerable.
William Covell’s A Modest and Reasonable Examination offers a good example of the Stuart Protestant stance in favour of the status quo. For Covell, the most dangerous religious opponent was not the Catholic recusant, but the Protestant reformist.
Conformists like Covell were clear that church governments should be trusted for determining the nation’s doctrine and discipline, since tradition rather than novelty had ensured England’s political integrity. “ To haue a Cleargie vnhallowed, and the Church vnhonoured ” would bring disorder to the commonwealth (B1v). 177 Moreover, Covell continues, “to prouide for the safetie of the Church , for the publicke enioying of the
Word of God, for the maner of gouernment , for the maintenance of the Clergie , all these
(in a strict vnderstanding ) are the religious duties, and the honourable effects of the
King. ” Having defended the king’s jurisdiction over England’s ecclesiastical laws and policies, Covell backs his general assertion with more specific claims:
For to mislike the book of Orders is indirectly to affirme that we haue no
ministery (which some impudently shameles haue dared to affirme
177 William Covell, A Modest and Reasonable Examination, of Some Things in Vse in the Church of England, Sundrie Times Heretofore Misliked (London, 1604) STC 5882.
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plainly:) not to subscribe to the Booke of Common Prayer , is to teach that
we haue no forme of Church Liturgye : And lastly, to refuse to subscribe to
the Articles of Faith , is to make men beleeue, that our Church maintaineth
vnsound doctrine. (B2r)
Refusal to subscribe to, or denial of the central liturgy and tenets of England’s religion is here characterized as a form of religious denial. Therefore, as Covell notes emphatically,
“Kings ought to haue rule in all causes, ouer all persons, as it is warranted by the word, so it is confirmed to the Princes of this Land by Act of Parliament” (B2r–B2v). For
Covell, the puritan complaints of 1604 are not simply genuine attempts devised to correct church abuses; they are deliberate challenges to political authority. A Modest and
Reasonable Examination is more than a rehearsal of the conformist party line; it is a carefully designed treatise written to tackle the issues raised at Hampton Court, specifically the political issues pertaining to religious conformity and toleration. But in all those details we hear the same ultimatum Katherine faces in Rowley’s play: adhere to the royal policy on religion, or deny the loyalty owed to the king.
Katherine and Gardiner’s debate before King Henry takes on new significance in light of Chaderton’s and Jacob’s arguments for church reform and Colville’s defense of the status quo. Katherine’s alleged affiliation with those who hold beliefs that differ from the state religion is interpreted as a challenge to the state. By refusing outwardly to conform to the state religion Katherine opposes Henrician royal policy, thus making her religious dissent a form of political offence. Readers of Rowley’s 1605 quarto would have been able to see in the scenes involving Katherine Parr a political-religious controversy at the centre of early Stuart culture. While the Katherine Parr of history
111 followed Chaderton’s position for greater tolerance, in the play it is precisely when she speaks like Henry Jacob that she finds herself in serious trouble. After discovering that there is a warrant for her arrest, the queen pleads for her life, and she even denies her own ability to discuss matters of theology. Ultimately, she adheres to Covell’s demand that in matters of theology subjects must obey their prince.
To read the Katherine episodes in such terms is to argue that Rowley wrote within the dominant debates of his time. One way of measuring the importance of religious controversy as a subject of interest in the period leading up to and after the Hampton
Court Conference is by surveying the printed output for 1604. In looking through the surviving imprints for 1604 in the STC , one imprint immediately stands out, for the modern reader, amongst the rest: the second quarto of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet .
More has been written on this single play than on the nearly four hundred other surviving
1604 printings all together. 178 For the literary scholar, Hamlet is the pinnacle work printed in that year; however, this evaluation is based on four centuries of praise for
Shakespeare’s tragedy. In early modern England, the printing of the second quarto of
Hamlet would have been a minor event in comparison to the total printing of works on religious controversies that raged in 1604. Works arguing for and against the reformation of the new English Stuart church, some of which I have just discussed, form a substantial part of the total printed output of three hundred and ninety plus imprints for the year.
Only the various pamphlets on union approach the number of these religious polemics.
Whatever interest there was in the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark, it was not the dominant issue of 1604. Instead, what dominated the reading public’s interest that year,
178 See Volume 3 of the STC for the 1604 statistics.
112 or, at least what printers thought would sell in 1604, were debates over religious uniformity.
While many of the 1604 imprints surveyed concern Roman Catholic doctrine, a number of these works are produced by conformists defending the English ecclesiastical polity, or by reformists recommending changes to it. 179 In other words, much of the religious controversy in 1604 was between Protestants. This is important not simply for its possible applications to the scene from the play just discussed, but because it suggests problems with thinking about this period in strict Protestant-versus-Catholic terms. Most
Protestants in early Stuart England, including the king himself, subscribed to the same
Calvinist theology, even though they differed, often quite vehemently, on matters of governance and discipline—the institutionalized, political framework of religious practice. By 1605, it was becoming clear that James was unwilling to make significant reforms to the church’s doctrine, discipline and governance. While some emphasized the king’s reluctance as cause for disappointment, others turned optimistically to a future hope. The aspirations for a reformed Britain may not have come to pass with James’s accession, but change would come one day, many contemporaries believed, when his son
Henry ascended the throne.
7) Prince Edward, the Symbol of Hope
If Katherine Parr is the most intriguing character in When You See Me, You Know
Me , the young Prince Edward is arguably the most powerful. In the play, the youmg
179 For example, Gabriel Powel, A Consideration of the Papists Reasons of State and Religion, for Toleration of Poperie in England (Oxford, 1604) STC 20144; John Lecey, A Petition Apologeticall, Presented to the Kinges Most Excellent Maiesty, by the Lay Catholikes of England (Doway [i.e. England]: 1604) STC 4835; John Dove, A Perswasion to the English Recusants, to Reconcile Themselues to the Church of England (London, 1604) STC 7085–7085.5.
113
Edward articulates ideas beyond his years, and yet Rowley’s portrayal of the young prince matches what we know of the historical figure. 180 In addition to convincing the king of Katherine’s innocence and loyalty, Edward carries out a detailed discussion on philosophy and divinity with Archbishop Cranmer, and a similar discussion on music with his teacher Doctor Tye. In his questions to Cranmer regarding purgatory, Edward searches for answers on one of the most controversial of religious doctrines.
Edw. God giue ye truth that you may giue it me,
This Land ye know stands wauering in her Faith,
Betwixt the Papists and the Protestants,
You know we all must die, and this flesh
Part, with her part of immortalitie,
Tutor, I doe beleeue both Heauen and Hell:
Doe you know any third place for the soules abode
Cald'd Purgatorie, as some would haue me thinke. (G3v)
Throughout the play, Edward is free to debate matters of theology. While he repeatedly supports the reformist position on theological matters, here we see him ask Cranmer about the legitimacy of the doctrine of purgatory in order to ensure that his feelings on the subject are correct. Cranmer is able to convince him that any defense of purgatory is easily confutable, and by the end of the scene the young Prince seems eager to uphold the
180 In his recent biography of the boy king, Tudor Church Militant , Diarmaid MacCulloch presents compelling evidence to suggest that Edward was an accomplished essayist and orator with an advanced understanding of and interest in theology from his earliest years.
114 reformist cause, as witnessed by his offer to patronize Tye’s “The Acts of the holy
Apostles turn'd into verse” (G4v). 181
When he is not seen discussing theology with Cranmer, consoling Queen
Katherine Parr, or persuading King Henry VIII, in When You See Me Prince Edward is often characterized through the words of others. Even before Edward is born, Henry VIII imagines the birth of a son. When the king receives word that his wife, Jane Seymour, is pregnant, he hopes for the birth of a boy, “Now Iane God bring me but a chopping boy, /
Be but the Mother to a Prince of Wales.” (B1r). Henry’s wish is heard first in the prayers made by Wolsey for the forthcoming child (A3r), and then in Will Sommers’s calls for a young prince (B1r). Shortly after these predictions and prayers are made, Henry makes another projective glance at a future son, but this time his words reflect less upon the historical subject and more on the political moment in which the play was composed:
“Ad a ninth Henrie to the English Crowne, / And thou mak'st full my hopes, faire Queene adew: / And may heauens helping hand our ioyes renew” (B1r). We later learn that the young prince is to be named in commemoration of the day he was born, St. Edward’s day. So why then does the king speak of a ninth Henry? I would argue this is because
Rowley thinks of the young Prince Henry in his portrayal of Edward, and that this use of the name Henry makes the connection deliberate. But I would further emphasize that
181 The scenes involving the Prince are discussed in more detail in Lawhorn, “Taking Pains” 142–148. The Prince’s desire to versify parts of the Bible reflects a familiar Protestant ethos. In England, this was prominently expressed in The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Collected into Englysh Metre , by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. As Peter Blayney has shown, the Metrical Psalms went through 121 editions prior to 1598 and another 368 editions between 1598–1639. See “The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks,” SQ 56.1 (2005): 40–41, and Hamlin, Psalm Culture 19–50.
115
Rowley looks less to the life of the young Prince Henry for his model than to the rhetoric of hope commonly used to celebrate the Stuart heir apparent. 182
8) Prince Henry in Tudor England?
In the years following his arrival in England, King James’s first son, Henry, would become associated increasingly with ideas and aspirations his father tried earnestly to keep at bay. For many, the young boy came to represent a future solution to James and his pacifist policies. Indeed, by 1610, Henry’s reputation as the embodiment of chivalry and militant Protestantism was well established. 183 It is usually thought that in 1603 this vision of the prince was still largely unformed, but I would argue it was already prominent in Henry’s early years in England. In the many dedications and panegyrics for
Prince Henry printed in 1603/04, we encounter the foundations of the rhetoric of hope so common in later celebrations of the Prince. 184
Henoch Clapham offers a case in point. From the early 1590s he was, according to Alexandra Walsham, “a committed Presbyterian, from which position he progressed to outright rejection of the government of the Church of England as antichristian.” 185 A
182 For similar arguments on Rowley’s creation of an Edward/Henry parallel, see J.R. Mulryne, “Introduction: Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts,” Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts , eds. J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 18–19; F. Nostbakken, “Political Drama in Transition” 74–76; G.M. Pinciss, Forbidden Matter: Religion in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000) and Lawhorn, “Taking Pains” 133–134, 147 183 The later years of Henry’s life and reputation are discussed at length in both Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, and England's Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986) and Michael Ullyot, “Venerable Reader, Vulnerable Exemplar: Prince Henry and the Genres of Exemplarity,” diss., U of Toronto, 2005. 184 For a convenient chronological listing of books dedicated to Prince Henry, see John Allan Buchtel, “Book Dedications in Early Modern England: Francis Bacon, George Chapman, and the Literary Patronage of Henry, Prince of Wales, ” diss., U of Virginia, 2004, 212–226. Some of the early dedications and manuscript letters to Henry are discussed in Thomas Birch, The Life of Henry Prince of Wales, Eldest Son of King James I. Compiled Chiefly from his own Papers, and other Manuscripts (London, 1760), 40–47. 185 ODNB
116 preacher in London, he regularly dedicated works to Prince Henry. In his 1603 A Briefe of the Bibles Historie , Clapham spoke of Henry as the boy “Who fro[m] two yeares of age…. haue giuen admirable cause of all good Hopes” (A3r). 186 Hope for Clapham came in the form of religious reform, and his commitment to defending his beliefs in 1603 and
1604 led him to various altercations with English authorities, including the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Richard Bancroft. Thomas Wilcocks also alluded to the future in his praises for Henry. In the preface to the 1604 edition of Philip Sidney’s and Arthur Golding’s translation of Philippe de Mornay's A VVoorke Concerning the Trunesse of Christian
Religion , Wilcocks argued that Henry was made for the church’s good, and that Henry’s reading of this work would help “stirre” him to action (A1r–A2v). 187 Moreover, as
Patrick Collinson reminds us, Wilcocks was one of the ministers who briefed the puritan spokesmen prior to the Hampton Court conference. 188 Another divine seeking patronage from Henry was William Willymat. In his A Princes Looking Glasse , a 1603 compilation of extracts based on James’s Basilikon Doron , he spoke of God’s hand guiding Henry so that he “may in some good measure satisfie the heartie hope and desired expectation”
(A3v). 189 Interestingly, Willymat was a conformist, and therefore a reminder that one man’s hope for the Prince could differ significantly from another’s. But Willymat’s conservatism is more the exception than the norm for the writers, particularly the divines, who dedicated works to Henry. In addition to the many works on chivalry and political theory dedicated to Henry, there were religious treatises. That many of them came from
186 A Briefe of the Bibles Historie (London, 1603) STC 5333. 187 (London, 1604) STC 18151. 188 ODNB 189 A Princes Looking Glasse, or A Princes Direction (Cambridge: 1603) STC 14357. Willymat’s A Loyal Subjects Looking-Glasse , STC 25760, which was printed a year later, was also dedicated to Prince Henry.
117 reformists rather than conformists offers powerful evidence for a connection between
Henry and Puritanism as early as 1603–1604.
That connection, I would argue, is present in the figure of Prince Edward in
Rowley’s play. When Henry VIII claims in the play that “hee shall be defender of the faith too, one day” (D1r), the king addresses a familiar early modern commonplace on the continuity of kingship. But when the king says later in the play “That what our age shall leaue vnfinished, / In his faire raigne shall be accomplished” (F1v), he predicts a future where Edward’s accomplishments are measured in reforms. Henry’s words align with the familiar Foxean interpretation of Edward’s reign, namely that the religious abuses of the Henrician church were rectified only after the accession of Edward in 1547. Henry’s words also speak to the growing sense of hope connected to Prince Henry in the early years of James’s reign. Indeed, Rowley uses Tudor associations from the past to comment on a set of current Stuart ones. It is here that past and present politics merge
9) Reading Debates on Conformity in 1605
At the beginning of this chapter, I reflected on the familiar tendency of scholars to define, and sometimes condemn, Rowley’s When You See Me for its episodic and rambling structure, and its inaccurate use of chronology. Critical readings of this kind are understandable, especially when When You See Me is considered in relation to tightly unified narrative-driven history plays based on specific periods of a particular reign, like
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, or Henry V . Even Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play on
Henry VIII, All is True offers a more unified narrative of the reign of Henry VIII than
Rowley’s play does. Unfortunately, Shakespeare’s shadow prevents us from
118 understanding plays like When You See Me. Shakespeare’s history plays, although themselves quite different from one another, nevertheless have provided us with a set of fixed expectations for what this particular genre ought to look like. Instead of identifying why Rowley’s play fails for modern readers, we need to consider why early modern playgoers and readers found it so captivating, for by all indications When You See Me was a major success in early modern England. In thirty-five years, it went through five quarto printings. As with If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie , it was regularly published in London between 1605 and 1640. 190 Why were these two plays so popular?
It is likely that Rowley’s and Heywood’s histories in print picked up on earlier success in the playhouse. Moreover, before 1603 it was taboo to stage a representation of a Tudor monarch, and so dramatization of either Henry VIII’s or Elizabeth I’s reign, on stage, or in print, must have been of great interest to early Stuart audiences. But as I have been arguing in Chapter 2 and throughout this chapter, these plays also confronted some of the most controversial issues in early Stuart England. The right to uphold individual private beliefs, especially religious beliefs that contradicted those sanctioned by the state, had been a regular subject of debate since the reign of Henry VIII, and especially after the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer in Edward’s reign. This issue, central to
Foxe’s Actes and Monuments , remained current into the Stuart period. In 1603–1605, the debates over religious conformity came to a head as discontented subjects hoped James would reform the English church, or, at least, grant greater tolerance for those who disagreed with the state’s prerogative.
Placing Rowley’s play within rather than outside of the political moment, and reading it in conjunction with other related contemporaneous printed works, provides an
190 Following the first quarto of 1605, editions of the play were printed in 1613, 1621 and 1632.
119 explanation for the play’s episodic structure. Instead of a broken narrative, early modern readers found in the play a conformist-reformist style debate, familiar accusations made by puritan divines, and a recognizable rhetoric of hope for Prince Henry. They read, in the scenes between Katherine and Henry, debates on issues that had dominated political- religious debate at the Hampton Court Conference, and subsequently, also in the bookstalls of 1604. In 1605, When You See Me offered the present in terms of the past by using snapshots of history that were familiar and applicable to current Stuart politics. In this play of frustration and hope, playgoers and readers discovered not so much Tudor history as the Stuart situation in which they found themselves
120
CHAPTER FOUR
The Tudor Legacy of Pan-Protestantism: The Dutch-men’s Pageant, Anglo-Spanish Peace Negotiations, and The Magnificent Entertainment (1604) 191
James I’s English coronation entry took place on 15 March 1604, nearly nine months after his coronation on 25 July 1603. The postponement came as a response to the plague that had shut down nearly all official activity in London and its immediate surroundings.
Despite the long delay, the entry followed the usual English ceremonial precedent: the new king processed from the Tower of London to Westminster along a centuries-old route with an entourage of English nobility, high-ranking politicians, ecclesiasts, judicial leaders, a select number of foreign ambassadors, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, as well as members of the royal family and their households. The crowds of spectators occupying the streets on the route, and those peering from building scaffolds and windows, watched their new monarch as he stopped at preset locations to listen to speeches and allegorical dialogues by various performers. The ceremonial route was designed in the style of an ancient Roman triumph; the seven, imperial-style arches, which were positioned at symbolic landmarks along the route, formed the ultimate visual reminder of the classical inspiration behind the pageant’s design. Such classical,
191 The English translation of “The Dutch-men’s Pageant” appears in Thomas Dekker, The VVhole Magnificent Entertainment Giuen to King Iames (London, 1604) STC 6513, the longest and most detailed account of James’s coronation entry. All quotations throughout this chapter are taken from this second quarto edition. Dekker’s text was also printed in Edinburgh. See the revised STC and Bowers’s Textual Introduction for bibliographical details. Details of the occasion and its cultural context are discussed in the Introductions to the four editions of The Magnificent Entertainment by Bowers and Hoy, Dutton, Kinney and Smuts. Dekker’s is one of several English accounts of the day’s proceedings. The others include Ben Jonson, His Part of King Iames his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement (London, [1604]) STC 14756; William Dugdale, The Time Triumphant (London, 1604) STC 7292, a short journalistic account; and Stephen Harrison, The Arch’s of Triumph (London, 1604) STC 12863, an elaborate folio comprising the printed engravings of the arches used in the entry. For an overview of the printed and other manuscript sources dedicated to the occasion, see Malcolm R. Smuts, “Occasional Events, Literary Texts and Historical Interpretations,” Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics, eds. Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and Rowland Wymer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000) 179–198.
121 imperial-style imagery was commonplace in European Renaissance pageantry by the time of the entry in 1604; nevertheless, if visiting foreign ambassadors and dignitaries present at James’s entry found this thematic approach familiar, they would also have understood the particular appropriateness of that day’s imperial-style program. 192 By 1603 James had ruled for decades as King of Scotland; however, by ascending the English throne he had become ruler of the multiple kingdoms of Britain.
While much of the 1604 entry adopted the language and imagery of imperium to celebrate James’s new symbolic status as King of Great Britain, not all of the pageantry focused on this theme. One pageant in particular, “The Pageant of the Dutch-men at the
Royal Exchange,” presented a very different message. Instead of celebrating the new king as head of a united kingdom, the London-based Dutch merchants responsible for the device used the occasion to focus on the King of England’s role as a pan-Protestant
European ally. An essential part of their message, which was more admonitory than celebratory in its tone, depended upon the earlier achievements of Tudor royals. In both its visual and verbal gestures, the Dutch pageant repeatedly urged James to follow the examples of Edward VI and Elizabeth I; in particular the pageant advised the king to follow the lead of his predecessors and protect the existing political-religious and economic interests shared between England and the Dutch Republic. The timing of the pageant was significant since in March of 1604 James’s Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, was in correspondence over a possible peace with Catholic Spain. The official truce, The
London Treaty, was signed at Somerset House on 19 August, several months after the royal entry. The London-Dutch community had good reason to be concerned about this
192 For pre-1604 examples of French, Italian and Dutch triumphal entries see Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1470–1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1984) and Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
122 move towards peace. England’s two decades of war with Spain had ensured that the
Dutch Republic remained protected; peace with Spain meant that the unprotected
Republic would be open to Spanish attack, and the flourishing trade between England and the Low Countries was also bound to suffer. Still, in March 1604 Anglo-Spanish peace was not a foregone conclusion. The London-Dutch community responsible for designing the pageantry at James’s entry therefore used the occasion to alert the king to the importance of protecting Anglo-Dutch interests. This message of protectionism was not simply a critique of an Anglo-Spanish peace but a concerted attempt to move the king to change his foreign policy. Instead of celebrating James as the head of a new kingdom, as many of the pageant writers did, the London-based Dutch writers cited the policies devised by Tudor monarchs to protect Anglo-Dutch economic and religious interests: to remind the king of the agreements he needed to honour; to remind him that even though he had become a British king he still needed to uphold certain English commitments. 193
This chapter builds upon the two previous chapters by proposing a topical reading for another piece of Stuart drama on the Tudor royals, produced in 1604. In looking at
193 My exclusive focus on the Dutch pageant as topical drama joins an ever-expanding number of studies on James’s royal entry of 1604. The most important contributor to the entry remains David Bergeron. For over forty years Bergeron has written articles and chapters on a wide range of topics related to this entry. He has gathered together contemporary print and manuscript sources pertaining to the occasion, and noted discrepancies that exist between the various accounts; unearthed evidence of foreign dignitaries disputing their order in the ceremonial procession; and, studied the relationship between the entry and James’s opening speech to parliament four days after the event. In short, Bergeron has reconstructed much of what happened in London on 15 March 1604. See his English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971) 66–89; “Harrison, Jonson, Dekker: The Magnificent Entertainment for King James (1604),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 445–448; “Venetian State Papers and English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642,” Renaissance Quarterly 23.1 (1970): 41; and, “King James’s Civic Pageant and Parliamentary Speech in March 1604,” Albion 34.2 (2002): 203–31. See also: Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981) 1–39; Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) 33–54; Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 36–43; Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City 1595–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 137–142. Additional articles and chapters on the entry by Anne Lancashire, James D. Mardock, Joseph Loewenstein, Marjorie Rubright, Malcolm R. Smuts and Henry S. Turner are cited in specific footnotes below.
123 the Dutch pageant at James’s coronation entry I again aim to uncover the important ways in which the stories of the Tudor royals could serve in the early years of the Stuart reign as a form of critical commentary on contemporary politics. In order to flesh out my argument I will compare the Dutch pageant’s treatment of the Tudor royals with the
Italian pageant’s more celebratory treatment of the same. Before turning to this analysis, however, some background to the event is required.
Preparations for James’s coronation entry were begun shortly after the king started his progress from Edinburgh to the English capital in the spring of 1603. A horrific bout of the plague, however, forced the entry to be postponed. 194 James proceeded with his coronation on 25 July (St. James’s Day), but the accompanying royal entry to precede his investiture took place nearly a year later, on 15 March 1604. 195
Records from the journal of Symeon Ruytinck, head minister to the London-Dutch church at St. Austins from 1601–1621, provide fascinating detail on the effects of the postponement. According to Ruytinck, the massive ancient roman-style arches being built for the occasion in 1603 were not dismantled when the government announced the postponement, as assumed by David Bergeron and others, but rather left standing, for almost a year, unfinished in the streets. 196 Those Londoners who walked the plague-
194 The postponement was ordered by royal proclamation on 6 July 1603 (Larkin and Hughes 1:38). 195 For an extensive discussion of the coronation, see chapter six of Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: Harper Collins, 2005) 233–267. 196 Symeon Ruytinck’s manuscript records housed at the Guildhall Library in London and discussed in the two articles cited below offer valuable information on the bureaucratic arrangements, the names of the participants, and the costs associated with the building of one of the arches. English scholars have ignored this Anglo-Dutch material, including the Beschryuinghe Vande Herlycke Arcus Triumphal . . . ter Eeren . . .Coninck Jacobo (Middelburg, 1604). This elaborate folio details the London-Dutch community’s participation in the 1604 event, and provides an illustrated engraving of the front and back of the arch erected at the Royal Exchange. The Beschryuinghe survives in a single copy, currently housed at the Royal Library, Brussels. For discussion of this neglected primary material, see Gervase Hood, “A Netherlandic Triumphal Arch for James I, ” Across the Narrow Seas: Studies in the History and Bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries. Presented to Anna E. C. Simoni , ed. Susan Roach (London: British Library, 1991)
124 ridden metropolis between July 1603 and February 1604 would have encountered visual pageantry for an entry that had yet to take place, and this postponement may have had consequences for how the Dutch pageant was designed.
Because James’s entry was delayed for more than nine months, pageant writers had the chance to adopt and change their devices to fit the ever-evolving political, religious and economic Stuart agenda. This agenda included the Stuart government’s work on the Anglo-Spanish peace agreement. In July 1603, talks between England and
Spain were still in their infancy under the new king, but evidence suggests that nine months later peace with Spain was drawing closer. The Dutch Pageant in March 1604, therefore, responded to a different set of political circumstances, and a more detailed kingly agenda, than that established in the early months of 1603. After a year-long hiatus, James was welcomed through an illustrious and resplendent form of display based on a long tradition of English ritual; but he was also celebrated by individuals and communities who chose to emphasize very different aspects of the king’s ideological agenda. I will highlight this difference by comparing the agendas of the Italian and the
Dutch pageants.
1) The Italians’ Pageant
Much of our understanding of James’s royal entry, including our knowledge of the Italian and Dutch pageants, derives from Thomas Dekker’s The Magnificent
Entertainment . Dekker acts not only as author but also as compiler. As the title-page to his work highlights, he is part of a larger collaborative effort that includes the
67–82; Ole Peter Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) 163– 174.
125 contributions made by London’s Italian and Dutch residents, the so-called “stranger” communities. 197 This is an important point, for it is because of Dekker that we have an
English account of the Dutch pageant; and yet other non-English accounts of the Dutch pageant illustrate the incompleteness of Dekker’s account. Therefore, while my focus will be on Dekker’s account primarily, I will also consider other non-English print and manuscript records related to the Dutch pageant, since these supplementary accounts offer details that are missing from Dekker’s account.
Many of the devices used at James’s coronation entry look to the past to celebrate the king, and some of them even look to the Tudor past to do so. In most cases the
Tudors are evoked to remind James of his hereditary right to the English throne.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Italians’ Pageant . After stopping at an initial pageant devised by Ben Jonson, James proceeded westward to Gracechurch (i.e.
Gracious) Street, where he encountered the second of six arches, this one designed and constructed by London’s resident Italian community. “Architecturally the most chaste and classically correct,” the “Italian Arch” showcased a selection of engraved and painted
197 The full title reads: The VVhole Magnificent Entertainment Giuen to King Iames, Queene Anne his Wife, and Henry Frederick the Prince; Vpon the day of his Maiesties Tryumphant Passage (from the Tower) through his Honorable Citie (and chamber) of London, the 15. of March. 1603. Aswell by the English, as by the Strangers, with the Speeches and Songs, Deliuered in the Seuerall Pageants. And those Speeches that before were Publish't in Latin, now Newly Set Forth in English. Tho. Dekker (London, 1604). Jonson’s B. Ion: His Part Of King Iames his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement , as the title to his work suggests, documents only his contributions to the design of the entry, the first and the last pageant respectively. Dekker designed the dramatic exchanges for pageants four through six, while the foreign communities produced speeches and visuals for the second and third pageants. The title-pages to Dekker’s and Jonson’s accounts provide the first indication that each writer sees the event differently. As various critics have suggested, Jonson’s account is more of an intellectual exercise, an authored, scholarly account, annotated and researched in the spirit of European humanism, whereas Dekker’s text is more inclusive, offering an account that privileges the different contributors to the occasion, including the work by joiners and carpenters, civic dignitaries, and even the common citizens of London. On the different ideologies of Dekker’s and Jonson’s accounts, see Henry S. Turner, The Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 133–152; Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 252–254; Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 170– 171; and, James D. Mardock, Our Scene is London. Ben Jonson’s City and the Space of the Author (London: Routledge, 2008) 23–44.
126 mythological scenes and figures. 198 At its centre – and undoubtedly its focal point – was a large painting of James seated on horseback, receiving the royal sceptre from Henry
VII, James’s great-grandfather and founder of the Tudor dynasty. 199 The Latin inscriptions “IACOBO REGI MAGN” (The Great King James) and “HENRICI VII
ABNEP.” (Great, great grandson of Henry VII) engraved below the painting expressed in words the visual gesture. The new-quartered royal arms, which now incorporated the
Scottish lion rampant, figured prominently below the painting. 200 If, as Graham Parry notes, the painting celebrated “the legitimacy of James’s inheritance as the true successor to the Tudor line,” the arms recognized the new regnal union between England and
Scotland. 201 The Italian arch celebrated the English royal prerogative unconditionally, representing in visual form what had been endorsed in official proclamations and speeches throughout 1603 and 1604.
When James was proclaimed king on 24 March 1603, his “Undoubted Right” to the English throne depended on his Tudor ancestry. Robert Cecil, who devised the proclamation, emphasized that James was:
lineally and lawfully descended from the body of Margaret,
198 Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d 9. 199 The passing of an object from one majestic figure to another was a commonplace gesture used to evoke continuity and legitimacy in medieval and early modern pageantry. Evidence of such ritual in English pageantry is found e.g., 1392, at the second pageant for Richard II’s reconciliation entry. From high above, on a tower, two youths dressed as angels descended to present the king with a chalice filled with wine and two golden crowns. In 1392 the offering was infused with religious significance, but it was nevertheless a similar action to that envisioned on the Italian Arch. For discussion of Richard II’s 1392 reconciliation entry, see Kipling, Enter the King ; for a discussion of such gesturing in Richard’s entry of 1377, and the entry for him in 1392, see Anne Lancashire, London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 45; n. 62–69 and her “Early London Pageantry and Theater History Firsts,” Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 84–92. 200 Magnificent Entertainment C2r. 201 Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd 9. On 4 April 1603, Robert Cecil signed the warrant on behalf of the king, requesting two new signets combining the arms of England and Scotland (SP 40/1/59). For an illustration of the document and a discussion of its significance, see James Travers, James I: The Masque of Monarchy (Richmond, Surrey: The National Archives, 2003) 16–17.
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daughter to the High and Renowmed Prince, Henrie the Seuenth King
of England, France & Ireland, his Great Grandfather, the said Lady
Margaret being lawfully begotten of the body of Elizabeth, daughter
to King Edward the fourth (by which happy coniunction both the houses
of Yorke & Lancaster were vnited, to the ioy unspeakeable of this
kingdome, formerly rent & torne by the long dissention of bloody and
Civil Warres) the same Lady Margaret being also the eldest sister of
Henry the eight, of famous memorie King of England as aforesaid. 202
Cecil recognized that James’s legitimate right to succeed as English king depended on a
Stuart English pedigree. James had been considered a likely candidate to succeed
Elizabeth from the 1590s onwards, but he was by no means the only claimant. 203 Even when Elizabeth died, childless, there had been no previous public pronouncement on the future status of England’s hereditary monarchy. 204 Therefore it is not surprising that celebrants of the new Stuart king focused heavily on James’s Tudor connections.
Although the Italian Arch was completed nearly a year after Cecil’s proclamation, it nevertheless served a similar purpose, for it too endorsed James’s legitimate claim to the
English throne by alluding to the Tudor past, particularly to the figure of Henry VII.
In his opening speech to Parliament only four days after the royal entry, the new
Stuart king again turned to the Tudor past to defend his claim, using words and imagery
202 All references are to STC 8298. See Larkin & Hughes 1:1–3 203 The most famous and most controversial contemporary discussion of the various claimants came in an account by Robert Doleman, an alias for the English Jesuit William Allen and others, entitled A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of Ingland ([Antwerp], 1594) STC 19398. 204 By 1601, Elizabeth’s chief secretary, Robert Cecil, had started secret negotiations with James on the succession.
128 similar to those present in the 1603 proclamation and the 1604 Italian Arch. 205 On this occasion, James also used the Tudor past to promote a future united Britain:
First, by my descent lineally out of the loynes of Henry the seuenth,
is reunited and confirmed in meet the Vnion of the two Princely
Roses of the two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, whereof
That King of happy memorie was the first Vniter, as he was also
the first ground-layer of the other Peace. The lamentable and miserable
euents by the Ciuill and bloody dissention betwixt these two Houses
was so great and so late, as it need not be renewed vnto your memories.
which as it was first settled and vnited in him, so it is now reunited
and confirmed in me, being iustly and lineally descended, not onely of
that happie coniunction, but of both the Branches thereof many times
before. But the Vnion of these two princely Houses, is nothing
comparable to the Vnion of the two ancient & famous Kingdomes,
which is the other inward Peace annexed to my person. (A4v) 206
James displaces Henry’s achievement as the “first Vniter” with his own greater achievement, “the Vnion of two ancient and famous Kingdomes.” His words reflect the
205 For a more detailed discussion of the link, see Bergeron, “King James’s Civic Pageant and Parliamentary Speech.” 206 “ The Kings Maiesties Speech, as it was Deliuered by Him in the Vpper House of the Parliament to the Lords Spirituall and Temporall … March 1603 [1604]” STC 14390. The speech is reprinted in King James VI and I: Political Writings , ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 132–146. After becoming king, James repeatedly drew attention to his Tudor pedigree; he decided early in his reign to be buried next to Henry VII at the chapel in Westminster Abbey. However, to do this the king had to authorize the relocation of the coffin and effigy of Queen Elizabeth, as she had been buried next to the founder of the Tudor line. In 1606, James proceeded to have Elizabeth relocated to rest beside her Catholic step-sister, Mary. He also built an elaborate monument with “effigy and canopy” in the same chapel for his mother, Mary Stuart, who had to be moved from Peterborough, where she had been buried by orders from Elizabeth. See Julia M. Walker, “Reading the Tombs of Elizabeth I,” ELR 26.3 (1996): 510– 530; and, Richard C. McCoy, “Conjunction and Commemoration in Hamlet ,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 122–139.
129 crown’s attempts to generate general support for the idea of union to the masses, as witnessed by the coronation medals and currency minted in 1603–1604, which pictured
James as an Imperial emperor, a Caesar reincarnate.207
James’s accession in 1603 made him, de facto , King of the British Isles, a position that immediately separated him from the Tudors. However, as Roger Lockyer has noted, this union of crowns did not guarantee a union of states. 208 Just how James would govern these two neighbouring kingdoms, these centuries-old enemies, each with its own distinct constitutional, legal and religious institutions, was a major subject of debate in 1603–
1604. This controversy may also help to explain the pageantry’s insistence on James’s
Tudor connections. James’s genealogical account and his idea of a future Britain in his speech to Parliament are founded on a similar employment of the Tudor past, one that conveniently provided the precedent for defending succession and promoting union. The
Italian arch was simply the visual equivalent of James’s Cecil-like oral announcement; more significantly, it endorsed the king’s prerogative. 209
207 The different coins minted for James in 1604 emphasized his role as Emperor of Great Britain; the coronation medal, for instance, reads, “Caesar Augustus of Britain.” See, Roger Lockyer, James VI and I (London: Longman, 1998) 51. Photos of these coins are reprinted in Goldberg, James I 46. 208 The genuine fear that a union of states would entail the abolishment of fundamental English laws and liberties, some of which dated back as far as Magna Carta, was a point raised by parliamentarians opposed to James’s plans for “one worship to God, one kingdom entirely governed, one uniformity of laws”. For overviews of the potential implications of union, see Roger Lockyer, James VI and I (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) 53–62. For further discussions of union, see Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986); Brian Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Jennifer Wormald, “James VI, James I and the Identity of Britain,” The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago , ed. B. Bradshaw and J. Morrill (Houndmills-Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996) 148–71. 209 This idea of a united Britain is present not only in the Italians’ pageant, but also in a pageant that Dekker describes in The Magnificent Entertainment as “layd by” (B2v). While critics have typically assumed that “layd by” is a reference to an abandoned pageant designed for the 1604 royal entry, we now know that it was a pageant likely designed by Dekker for James’s May 1603 Accession entry. See Anne Lancashire, “Dekker’s Accession Pageant for James I,” Early Theatre 12.1 (2009): 39–50.
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2) The Pageant of the Dutch-men, 210 by the Royal Exchange
The Dutch pageant, like the Italian pageant that preceded it in the entry, also looked to the Tudor royals when instructing the king, but unlike the Italian pageant the
Dutch one did not celebrate the king’s prerogative on union. Instead, its often encoded economic and political statements in front of the Royal Exchange were designed to persuade the king not to reach peace with Spain. Before turning to an examination of the pageant, some overview of the Anglo-Spanish war is required.
When James became King of England in March 1603, the country had been at war with Spain for eighteen years. While the Anglo-Spanish war extended from Ireland to the shipping routes in the Americas, much of the fighting had been carried out in the
Low Countries, i.e. in what is now modern-day Holland and Belgium. While parts of the
Low Countries were comprised of Catholic territories (e.g. Flanders), and occupied and administered by Spanish dukes, other territories (e.g. the United Provinces) were controlled by Protestant leaders of the Estates General. The Spanish Hapsburgs felt they had jurisdiction over the Low Countries, and thus were simply fighting for what they deemed to be lawfully theirs; England, on the other hand, argued that Spain was occupying a united set of Provinces, and that England was therefore obliged to act as protector by providing money, weapons and soldiers in assistance. This support began in
210 Dekker also refers to the Dutch as Belgians (E2r) and as strangers (title-page). The first designation was used to describe people from the seventeen provinces that made up the Netherlands, such as Zutphen, Zeeland, Flanders and Friesland (Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in “The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker,” ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 2: 144); the second term was used to describe those members of English society who were foreign-born or of foreign descent. Dekker’s designations are misleading for modern readers; it is clear from surviving printed and MS accounts of the Dutch arch (see below) that many of those involved in its design and construction were local Dutch “strangers,” but some were foreigners called from Holland to London to lend expertise. For discussions of the Dutch communities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, see Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities and Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars 1603–42 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989).
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1585 with Elizabeth’s signing of the Treaty of Nonsuch, and it continued yearly until
1603.
England was clear that it was also protecting a Protestant ally against a Catholic menace. Still, whatever ideological commitments England had to international
Protestantism, by 1603–1604 it could not ignore the fact that this war had been and continued to be expensive. One way of alleviating the financial burden would be to abandon the fight altogether. As Pauline Croft notes, however, “If England abandoned the United Provinces only to see them steamrolled by the Spanish army in Flanders, the men and the money sacrificed in their defence since 1585 would have been wasted. Even worse, if Spain ever gained full control of the Low Countries, England would [due to its geographic proximity] be frighteningly vulnerable.”211 Stuart writers Robert Cotton and
Edward Hoby argued that an Anglo-Spanish peace would also force the Dutch to seek another nation, likely France, as protector. Walter Raleigh, writing to the king in 1603, suggested as much when he prayed to “never live to see the day wherein the French shall be masters of the Netherlands upon any conditions.”212 Moreover, fighting in the Low
Countries ensured that trade continued to flourish between England and the Low
Countries, whereas Spanish control of the Dutch provinces would result in sanctions and heavy restrictions on trade. Peace, therefore, as some contemporaries argued, could be as costly, ideologically and economically, as war.
The Dutch pageant at the Royal Exchange engaged with both the political- religious and economic repercussions of an Anglo-Spanish peace; it was the first message
211 “ Rex Pacificus , Robert Cecil and the 1604 Peace with Spain,” The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences , eds. Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer and Jason Lawrence (Houndmills- Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 141–142. 212 Raleigh’s petition of May 1603 is cited in Andrew Thrush, “The Parliamentary Opposition to Peace with Spain in 1604: A Speech of Sir Edward Hoby,” Parliamentary History 23.3 (2004): 302.
132 that interests me here. Having left the Italian Pageant, James and his entourage proceeded westward to the Royal Exchange at Cornhill, where they encountered the arch erected by the London-Dutch community (see Fig. 8). “So wide did the bodie of it extend it selfe,” writes Stephen Harrison, “that it swallowed up the whole street” (E1r). 213
The exact dimensions of the Dutch arch – one of the largest, and probably the tallest, of the arches in the series – were recorded in a lavish 1604 folio printed by Richard
Schilders in Middelburg for the architect and compiler, Contraet Jansen, in Southwark.
Jansen’s Beschryuinghe Vande Herlycke Arcus Trivmphal ofte Eerepoorte vande
Nederlantshe Natie opgherect in London describes the arch as being eighty-seven feet high by thirty-seven feet wide and twenty-two feet long; Dekker adds further details, noting that the arch’s main gate measured eighteen feet high by twelve feet wide (D1r). 214
A figure representing Divine Providence stood atop the arch, and immediately below her was a representation of an imperial crown with two sceptres. At the centre of the top level of this tripartite structure was a picture of James, enthroned with imperial robes, crown, sceptre, and sword. The allegorical figures Religio and Pietas stood on either side of him, while similar larger figures representing Justice and Fortitude stood adjacent to the king on pedestals, flanked by obelisks at each end of the arch. Below them was a gallery reserved for trumpeters, drummers and flutists.
213 Stephen Harrison, The Arch’s Of Triumph, Erected in Honor of the High and Mighty Prince Iames …(London, 1603 [1604]) STC 12863. For discussions of Harrison’s publication, and William Kip’s engravings in that publication, see A.M. Hind, “William Kip and Stephen Harrison’s Archs of Triumph (1604),” Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries , 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955) 2:17–29. 214 All facts about this publication are taken from Hood, “A Netharlandic Triumphal Arch” and Grell, Calvinist Exiles .
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FIGURE 7
“The Dutch arch” in Stephen Harrison, The Arch’s of Triumph (London, 1604) STC 12863a. Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library (call number STC 12863a).
134
FIGURE 7a
King David and King Josiah. Detail from “The Dutch arch” in Stephen Harrison, The Arch’s of Triumph (London, 1604) STC 12863a. Reproduced with permission of the the Folger Shakespeare Library (call number STC 12863a).
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FIGURE 7b
King Lucius and King Edward VI. Detail from “The Dutch arch” in Stephen Harrison, The Arch’s of Triumph (London, 1604) STC 12863a. Reproduced with permission of the the Folger Shakespeare Library (call number STC 12863a).
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In the central level of the arch was what Dekker describes as a “spacious square roome, left open, Silke Curtaines drawne before it,” where “17. yong Damsels (all of them sumptuously adorned, after their countrey fashion),” symbolized the “17. Prouinces of Belgia ” (D2r). Before them was a large Latin epigram in gold engraved into an azure table. According to Gervase Hood, this inscription instructed James to “continue
Elizabeth’s policy of protecting the refugee community and praised him as a bringer of peace and the defender of the world of God.” 215 On either side of this table were sets of allegories atop paintings of kings. On the left was Faith and Love over a painting of the
Old Testament kings, David and Josiah; on the right stood Hope and Peace above Lucius, the first English Christian king, and Edward VI, the Tudor boy king (see Figs. 8a and
8b). 216 Finally, below the main room and inscription was a painting of a phoenix.
Taken as a whole, the Dutch arch’s allegorical figures, iconography, and inscriptions were designed to remind James that his Protestant kingship was inherited from Tudor monarchs who protected the political and religious interests of the Dutch in
London and in the Republic. This message is made clear from the choice of kings visualized or invoked in the design: David, Josiah, Lucius, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I.
The four kings engraved into the Dutch arch are presented as exemplary rulers, devised, I would argue, according to two common systems of Christian thought. One system requires that we interpret them as part of a genealogy of Christian kingship, arranged chronologically in the style of the Jesse tree. Imagined this way, the Old
Testament kings David and Josiah form the base or roots of the tree, while the ancient
British king, Lucius, and the Tudor boy king, Edward VI, function as later branches.
215 Hood, “A Netharlandic Triumphal Arch” 76 216 Grell, Calvinist Exiles 168
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The second system—more related to than distinct from the first—requires we interpret the line of kings typologically: David is an archetype of Lucius, and Josiah is an archetype of Edward. In both systems of thought, the British kings are imagined as later embodiments of past Christian patriarchs. The representation of King James, positioned prominently above these kings, functions as the next branch in this dynastic tree, and as the embodiment of all four kings.
Visual gesturing of this kind was common in European pageantry; the Dutch
Arch thus adopts a centuries-old kind of representation; but, as noted above, this particular choice of kings reflects a distinctly Protestant influence. The kings chosen, especially the first three in the line, were all used by Tudor polemicists and propagandists to celebrate England’s status as a Protestant nation. Edward VI, the fourth king in the link, was responsible for welcoming Protestant Dutch refugees into London in the 1550s, and therefore, for them held a special place among the Tudor monarchs. When James arrived at the Dutch Arch at the Royal Exchange, he would have seen two godly rulers
(David and Lucius) of empires, and two reformers (Josiah and Edward VI) of the church, and a portrait of himself which, in the larger visual program, represented a founder- reformer of a new British Christian empire. More praise for the king? Not entirely, as this visual compliment is dependent on James’s ability to emulate the achievements of these past kings. In other words, this historical gesture is as much a call to act as it is a signal of praise. To understand this dual agenda we must consider how these four kings functioned in English Tudor reformation thought.
The first of the kings in chronological sequence was David, leader of the
Israelites, conqueror of empires, and author of the psalms. For Protestants David
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“provided what no Christian emperor could offer – his authority was directly derived from God, with no papal intermediary.” 217 It is no surprise then that he was a favourite archetype for Henry VIII, a king who imagined his imperial authority in like manner.
During Edward’s reign, David was evoked again with the introduction of the incredibly popular metrical psalms. First published in 1549, they proved a major source of
Protestant pride. 218
The next king in the sequence was Josiah, the biblical boy king, who was responsible for destroying what he saw as the corrupt iconoclasm of a tainted church. 2
Kings 23 documents Josiah’s iconoclasm, his breaking of temples, idols and any other
“material” aspects of what he saw as a false religion competing with the truth of God’s word. According to the English Geneva translation he was of singular significance because no other king had “turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might” (2 Kings 23 verse 25). 219
Josiah became a favourite archetype in the propaganda campaign of Edwardian
England. As Diarmaid MacCulloch notes, Josiah and Edward were imagined as “both boy kings who purged their land of idols. For the church of Edward VI, idolatry took the form of “holy statues and pictures, and indeed a high proportion of the other fittings and decoration of sacred buildings.” The Edwardian agenda was to destroy “that which stood as an obstacle between humanity and the truth of God,” 220 and its precedent was in
Josiah.
217 P. Tudor-Craig, “Henry VIII and King David,” Early Tudor England . Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium , ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989) 191. 218 MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant 12–13. 219 The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament (Geneva, 1560) X4v. 220 MacCulloch 14
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Lucius was, according to popular legend passed down from Geoffrey of
Monmouth, the second-century king responsible for establishing the first “pure” British church. For English Protestants, including John Bale, John Foxe, William Fulke, John
Speed and others, Lucius proved invaluable as a touchstone for explaining the
Reformation. All rested on a letter from Pope Eleutherius to King Lucius sanctioning the king to act independently from the pope in his administration of “Christian Britain.” 221
For Protestants, Lucius’s British church was important because it represented a “true” ancient foundation for the nation’s religion, one that was independent of Roman influence. Moreover, this model was ideal for Protestants convinced that the Reformation was a reinstatement of the one true church of ancient times. In other words, in the Dutch pageant, Lucius figures as both a “founder” of the British church and as an important link within the line of Reformer kings. 222
Edward was especially important to the Dutch community, for in 1550, during his reign, Dutch refugees settled in London in large numbers. Once in London, they were able to practice their own Swiss-style “reformed” religion in their own church in Austin
Friars—a doctrine and liturgy comprising rites and ceremonies separate from those of the church of England. 223 Thus Edward was also a kind of founder, the original protector of the foreign Dutch community. But references in the Dutch arch to Tudor kingship do not end with Edward. The use of the phoenix—a familiar symbol of rebirth often associated
221 This letter appears in William Lambarde’s Archainomia (London, 1568) STC 15142, 131–132. It represents one of the many texts edited and then used as propaganda, by Matthew Parker and his circle, to legitimize the Reformation. 222 For recent discussions of Lucius as a source for English Protestant polemic, see John E. Curran Jr. Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002) 37–86 and Felicity Heal, “What can King Lucius do for you? The Reformation and the Early British Church,” EHR 120.487 (June, 2005): 593– 614. 223 Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities 31–35.
140 with Elizabeth—at the bottom of the arch reminded spectators that despite the recent death of the Tudor queen, James’s accession ensured the further promotion of her ideals and principles.
One further icon with Tudor associations is found at the top of the arch, between
James and Divine Providence: the imperial crown. The imperial crown was a perfect symbol to celebrate James’s unification of the kingdoms of England and Scotland, his new empire. But the imperial crown had a long pedigree, beginning with Henry V. It became an especially potent symbol of the Reformation under Henry VIII. The first
Reformation statutes enacted during Henry VIII’s reign transformed the iconography of church and state. The “crown imperial” is a case in point, as it became a central icon in what Roy Strong describes as Henry’s “theocratic kingship.” 224 Found on the title pages of Bibles and official decrees, in woodcut illustrations and engravings, even on the country’s coinage, the newly designed arched or closed crown symbolized Henry’s full power as king. As the Act in Restraint of Appeals 225 famously states:
Where by dyvers sundrie olde authentike histories and cronicles it is
manifestly declared and expssed that this Realm of Englond is an Impire,
and so hath ben accepted in the worlde govned by oon supme heede and
King having the Dignitie and Roiall Estate of the Imperiall Crowne of the
same. . . (1533: 24 Henry VIII, c.1).
The 1534 Act of Supremacy reinforced Henry’s claim to rule over an English empire, as it declared for the crown all spiritual powers once held by the pope. The title-page of the
1535 Coverdale Bible illustrates this newly defined concentration of powers, as an
224 Strong, Coronation 186. 225 SR , 3: 427.
141 enthroned Henry wearing the “crown imperial” passes out Bibles to bishops kneeling to his right. At the bottom of the same title-page is a woodcut of the English arms and garter, complete with another “crown imperial.” The title-page captures the fundamental claims of Henry’s reformation, with the emblems of secular kingship used to adorn the new vernacular Bible. 226 Secular power and divine power, traditionally separated, are here conjoined in this new Reformation-inspired, imperial iconography. In the Dutch arch, James’s new empire is imagined as providentially sanctioned.
The imperial crown was thus both a perfect symbol to celebrate James’s new
Britain and a symbol with significant Tudor associations. Given the emphasis in the
Dutch program on the importance of the Tudor past, the imperial crown refers as much to the established Henrician idea of imperium as it does to the new British kingdom inherited by James. Taken in its totality, then, the Dutch pageant offers a strong endorsement of Protestant kingship. In the arch’s visual schema, James becomes the embodiment of centuries of godly militant rule: a role that contradicts his own promotion of international and domestic peace at the start of his English reign. The idea of James as militant ruler is articulated again in the oration presented at the arch to the king on that day. First, the speaker reminds James that he has been appointed by God to rule: “It is hee, that teaches thee the Art of Ruling ; because none but hee, made thee a King ” (E1v).
In one sense, the reminder reflects James’s own insistence on divine-right kingship, as seen in his various writings. But in another sense the message functions as a reminder that good kings adhere to the dictates of Christianity; indeed, the Speaker’s claim to
James that of all vertues, religion remains the highest supports this point. But the
226 Strong, Coronation , Ch. 5; Dale Hoak, “The Iconography of the Crown Imperial,” Tudor Political Culture , ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 54–103.
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Protestant aspect of this Christian message becomes clearest near the end of the oration, for it is then that the speaker reminds James of his role as protector of the Dutch community:
Wee (the Belgians) . . . a Nation banish from our owne Cradles;
yet nourcde & brought vp in the tender boosome of Princely Mother,
ELIZA. The Loue , which wee once dedicated to her (as a Mother) doubly
doe wee vow it to you, our Soueraigne, and Father; intreating wee may
be sheltred vnder your winges now, as then vnder hers. (E2r)
In 1604, the Dutch community was threatened by the prospect of England’s reaching peace with Catholic Spain; their one hope was that James would remain steadfast in his commitment to pan-Protestantism and pull out of the current peace negotiations. To emphasize that point, the Dutch reminded him that Elizabeth, his predecessor, had sheltered them from persecution. Would James nurture the Dutch as
Elizabeth had or would he abandon Tudor precedent? Would James join the line of famous kings set before him by upholding religion as the highest virtue, or would he ignore the examples set by these famous Christian rulers? As James exited through the arch erected by the Dutch, he would have been invited to look back at its reverse side.
There he would have seen scenes of Dutch workers, some spinning, some weaving, and some trading (D4r). These economic scenes, presented near the Royal Exchange, offered further reminders of the integral role the Dutch had played and continued to play in the
English economy. In the context of the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations, these scenes could be read as an additional incentive for the king to protect Dutch interests:
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FIGURE 8
This illustration showing King James VI in armour comes from Théodore de Bèze’s Icones (Geneva, 1580), *1v, a work that was dedicated to James. It is this image that the writers of the Dutch pageant imagine for the new British King. But it is also an image that James himself seemed to avoid in his later years as English king, instead fashioning himself as a peaceful ruler, the Rex Pacificus . James’s motto from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” shows a similar attempt to promote pacificism. Reproduced with permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Room (call number D-11 0452 RBSC).
144 the economic message to parallel the political-religious message advanced on the front of the arch.
While we may regard the Dutch pageant by the Royal Exchange as an exhortation to the king, a petition aimed to alter his foreign policy, we should also see it as a foreign community’s protecting of its political and economic interests at a time when it was under threat. Marjorie Rubright’s caveat is thus applicable here:
Scholarship on civic pageantry has conventionally attended to the
thematic trends of an entire pageant; in so doing, we implicitly read
civic pageantry from the perspective of the guest of honor who,
along with their entourage, would have experienced not only a
privileged perspective, but one unavailable to most of the city’s
inhabitants who clustered around particular pageant arches. Such
reading practices have tended to obfuscate the contribution of those
participatory and interpretive communities for whom pageantry’s
emphasis on social unity and budding English nationalism may have
proved illusory.
Considering that these Dutch merchants are “a community of people who had long lived in but were not of England” it is not suprising that their pageant’s themes look beyond
(and in this case challenge) the prerogatives of the English king, his court and his city. 227
It may also explain why this particular Protestant message “found no clear echoes elsewhere in the day’s pageantry.” 228 On 15 March 1604 there was no explicit discussion
227 Marjorie Rubright, “Double Dutch: Approximate Identities in Early Modern English Culture,” diss., U of Michigan, 2007, 188–189. 228 Malcolm Smuts, “The Making of Rex Pacificus : James VI and I and the Problem of Peace in An Age of Religious Wars,” Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I , eds. Daniel Fischlin and Mark
145 of the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations at the pageant erected by the London-Dutch community for James’s royal entry, and no call for the war to continue; but the visual and oral messages of godly rule and protectionism made that day suggest that the Anglo-
Spanish peace was the central focus of the pageantry presented by this foreign community. While critique at this pageant was veiled by praise, most contemporaries would have had little difficulty deciphering the encoded message: Remember your legacy, King James, stay true to the Protestant faith, and protect the interests of the
London-Dutch community.
Fortier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002) 374. See also Smuts’s comments on the Dutch pageant in his introduction to The Whole Royal and Magnificent Entertainment in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works , ed. Gary Taylor et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 222.
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CHAPTER FIVE
After the Gunpowder Plot: Imagining Elizabethan Crisis and Thomas Dekker’s The VVhore of Babylon (1607)
Thomas Dekker’s The VVhore of Babylon builds upon Thomas Heywood’s story of Princess Elizabeth in peril (the subject of Chapter 2) by focusing on a series of personal and national crises the queen experienced during the later years of her forty- five-year reign. Viewed from one vantage point, Dekker’s play functions as a sequel to If
You Knovv Not Me, because it begins with the same sequence of events, from Elizabeth’s coronation entry (January 1559), that ended Heywood’s play. When examined from another vantage point, however, one that concentrates on the play’s genre and its politics,
The VVhore of Babylon stands at odds with Heywood’s vision of the Tudor queen. In constructing a play that sees Elizabeth reject the marriage proposals of foreign princes, escape assassination by disgruntled subjects, and speak defiantly against invasions planned by foreign kings, Dekker ignored Heywood’s study of Princess Elizabeth’s exemplary behaviour in order to examine the larger implications of the crises Queen
Elizabeth lived through. Playgoers at The VVhore of Babylon in 1607 would have been alert to the parallels between Dekker’s sense of crisis because the play’s post-
Reformation understanding of political-religious struggle accords with the official responses to the Gunpowder Plot, the most famous of Stuart crises. Although the play uses an established Protestant understanding of apocalyptic struggle to define and chart the threats posed against the English state, its dramatization of Catholics infiltrating
England, on behalf of foreign powers, suggests Dekker intended his audiences to interpret his play in light of recent official responses to the Gunpowder Plot. The play’s discourse, particularly the language it adopts to articulate different crises, resembles the rhetoric
147 employed in the official speeches and sermons prepared by King James and England’s lawyers and bishops in response to the Gunpowder Plot. If Dekker’s The VVhore of
Babylon deserves a place in the long history of English apocalyptic writing and a place within the earliest Stuart treatments of Elizabeth’s life and reign, it also deserves a place alongside the early Stuart parliamentary speeches, court records, and sermons occasioned by the Gunpowder Plot.
This chapter considers the political-religious topicality of The VVhore of Babylon .
I argue that Dekker’s treatment of different crises in the play accords with the descriptions of the Roman Catholic threat against the state offered by English officials responding to the Gunpowder Plot. The chapter, divided into three sections, begins with a close analysis of various “scenes of crisis” from the play, then considers how those scenes appropriate the official Gunpowder Plot rhetoric, and then ends with a discussion of Dekker’s use of post-Reformation apocalyptic discourse in The VVhore of Babylon , particularly how it relates to, and ultimately validates, the play’s political argument. In detailing the formal, political and apocalyptic elements of The VVhore of Babylon, this chapter posits a framework for how Dekker intended his audiences in 1607 to interpret the play’s political-religious crises. 229
The characterization, language, and action of The VVhore of Babylon conform to a world defined in oppositional terms. As noted in its preface, or, “The Generall scope of this Dramaticall Poem,” the play aims to:
229 References to the Gunpowder Plot in the first and only quarto edition of The VVhore of Babylon suggest the play was completed no earlier than 5 November 1605 (the date of the plot) and no later than 20 April 1607 (the date upon which the play was entered in the Stationers’ Register). See A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 , 5 vols. ed. Edward Arber (London, 1875– 1877) 3: 152 . While some early twentieth-century critics have suggested that Dekker’s 1607 quarto represents an updated version of an earlier composition, this assertion rests entirely on speculation rather than evidence. The play’s topical references to the Gunpowder Plot, however, offer firm evidence for dating the play after November 1605.
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set forth (in Tropicall and shadowed collours) the Greatnes, Magnanimity,
Constancy, Clemency, and other the incomparable Heroical vertues of our
late Queene. And (on the contrary part) the inueterate malice, Treasons,
Machinations, Vnderminings, & continual blody stratagems, of that Purple
whore of Roome, to the taking away of our Princes liues, and vtter
extirpation of their Kingdomes. (A2r) 230
This prefatory agenda is realized in the action and characterization of the play, as Titania
(Elizabeth), her Counsellors and attendants (Florimell, Fidelli, etc.) wage battle against the Empresse of Babylon (Rome), her three kings (of France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain), cardinals, and other devotees. The play’s characterization mirrors the familiar examples of English medieval morality with the dramatis personae based on opposing virtues and vices, except that in The VVhore of Babylon this opposition also conforms to a post-Reformation taxonomy. Dekker’s “Purple whore of Roome” is a reference to the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation, but as was common in sixteenth-century Protestant polemic here she is further associated with the Roman
Catholic Church (see Fig. 10). In addition to exemplifying moral heroism, Elizabeth embodies the Protestant faith and its ideals. In other words, Dekker’s play maps the post-
Reformation view of apocalyptic struggle onto a centuries-old antithetical framework of moral allegory.
1) The Play
This political-religious understanding has important implications for how Dekker
230 All references are to the first and only quarto of The VVhore of Babylon (London, 1607) STC 6532.
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FIGURE 9
Fig. 10. The Whore of Babylon from Hugh Broughton, A Concent of Scripture (London, 1590), STC 3851, G5r. Reproduced with permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Room (call number knox 00912). 150 expected his 1607 audiences to interpret the Tudor past. The play chronicles Elizabeth’s reign in a traditional allegorical setting, but only the threats posed against her and
England from the 1570s to the 1590s. In the play, the marriage proposals Titania receives from the three kings, the secret plans the spies and rebels Paridell, Campeius, and Lopus conduct repeatedly throughout the play, and the conjurer’s defamation of her image, correspond to historical facts: the marriage proposals by Philip II, and the dukes of Anjou and Alençon, the spying and secrecy of William Parry, Edmund Campion, and
Dr. Lopez, and William Hackett’s destruction of Elizabeth’s portrait. All of these events derive from specific passages in Holinshed’s Chronicles (2 nd ed., 1587). Dekker’s selective use of chronicle material resembles that by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other contemporary London dramatists, except that rather than selecting historical material to form a single dramatic narrative, Dekker selects events that resemble one another in order to emphasize the consistency of a particular historical problem. This less familiar aesthetic, which is directly linked to Dekker’s anti-Catholic polemic, means that audiences of the play encounter similar, repeated historical scenarios rather than the condensed history of an entire reign. The exchanges by the allegorical figures Time,
Truth, and Plaine-Dealing throughout the play, along with the various dumbshows used to open various scenes, also have a similar effect of reducing history to absolutes and truisms. Although The VVhore of Babylon still deserves to be classified as a dramatic chronicle of Elizabeth’s life and reign, that classification needs to be qualified, for the play neglects key details from the queen’s life in order to emphasize the threats posed against her and the state.
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This emphasis on crisis begins when Elizabeth first encounters the kings. In The
VVhore of Babylon , three allegorical kings (of France, the Holy Roman Empire, and
Spain), along with the Empresse of Babylon , devise strategies on how to return England to Catholicism. The kings, who work on behalf of the Empresse, occasionally argue in favour of open war against England, but ultimately depend on flattery and cunning as the basis for their plots, strategies and devices. As a result, the play suggests that the ultimate threat to the stability of the English state is not the outward acts of aggression planned and carried out by foreign nations, but rather the secret acts (e.g. false speeches and disguises) employed by the foreign and domestic spies who work on behalf of those nations. Consequently, Titania’s (Elizabeth’s) success in the play depends on her ability to detect deception, particularly her ability to differentiate between true and fraudulent rhetoric.
The first of Titania’s rhetorical encounters comes early in the play, when the three kings present their proposals of marriage to her. The Third King (Spain) attempts to persuade the queen by alluding to his country’s strength and prowess, particularly its history of conquest: “The Indian and his gold are both my slaues, / Vpon my sword (as on the Axell tree) / A world of kingdomes mooue” (C1r–C1v). The First King (France), who speaks next, attempts to impress Titania by citing his country’s ancestry, “hundreds of kings / Haue royally bin fed” (C1v), and its imperial strength, “My Empire beares for greatnes, pollicy, / State, skill in Arts and Armes, sole soueraigntie / Of this Globe vniuersall” (C1v). Finally, the Second King (the Holy Roman Empire), alludes to the unmatchable strength of his kingdom, and suggests that Titania’s affiliation with Rome will in itself bring her greatness. The scene is conventional. Each of the kings offers a
152 similar temptation, a variation of the same worldly evil. The question is not whether
Titania will reject their offers but on what grounds she will reject them.
Interestingly, the answer to this question comes from the kings who intervene before Titania can respond: “We are all pleasd, so please you be the bride,/ Of three, we care not which two be deni'd” (C2r). The Second King continues,
For we are brethren, and those sacred breasts
From whence we draw our nourishment, would runne
Nectar to you (sweete as the food of life:)
Our aged mother twentie times an hower,
Would breath her wholesome kisses on your cheeke,
And from her own cup you should drinke that wine
Which none but Princes tast, to make you looke
With cheerefull countenance. (C2r)
Before Titania has a chance to respond, the kings reveal the common motivation—the
Empresse’s “Nectar”—that fuels each of their proposals. In so doing they reveal the false rhetoric that masks their ultimate agenda to convert England to Catholicism. That the kings openly undercut their individual proposals, and commit to a common goal, fulfils
Dekker’s polemical understanding of the play’s divided world. Before we denounce the kings as rhetorically naïve, we should remember that their responses conform to the didactic aims of Renaissance allegory. If evil by its very nature must reveal itself, then the kings simply expose what and who they represent. The historical particulars associated with the marriage proposals made to Elizabeth in the 1570s–1590s are, in The
VVhore of Babylon , reduced to the workings of a unified Catholic program.
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Having established this idea of singular evil, The VVhore of Babylon proceeds to stage different ways in which that threat operates. One of the most dangerous of these ways occurs when domestic subjects working on behalf of foreign powers infiltrate
England with “dangerous” ideas. The Third King’s persuasion of the poverty-stricken scholar Campeius (standing for the English Jesuit Edmund Campion) exemplifies the most dangerous threat, as he is able to convince the disgruntled Englishman to betray his own country. The Third King lures Campeius to his cause by empathizing with his poverty and by proclaiming that he too struggled as a scholar:
I fild my head
With books, but scarce could fil my mouth with bread,
I had the Muses smile, but moneyes frowne,
And neuer could get out of such a gowne. (E2r)
Seeing that The Third King also encountered these problems in his life, Campeius naturally asks how he escaped his poverty, to which the king replies:
By changing Aire:
The god of waues washt of my pouertie,
I sought out a new sunne beyond the seas,
VVhose beames begat me gold. (E2r)
As was the case in his proposal to Titania, the Third King uses riches to tempt Campeius.
Unlike Titania, Campeius is persuaded by the Third King, and consequently lashes out against his country: “(My countrey) lies so heauy on my back, / Pressing my worth downe, that I slowly creep / Through base and slimie waies” (E2r). However, it is how
Campeius attempts to seek revenge against England that proves most intriguing: “Beeing
154 hence, / Ile write in gall and poyson gainst my nurce / This Fairie land, for not rewarding merit:” (E2r); and, her heart—her very heart— / Would it were dried to dust, to strew vpon / Th'inuenomed paper vpon which Ile write” (E2v). Campeius seeks his revenge through words. He plans to write as a form of revenge, using, one suspects, polemic.
In The VVhore of Babylon, interchanges such as this between Campeius and the
Third King remind us of the rhetorical dimension of Dekker’s enemy. In the play, threats to church and state (actual and imagined) are regularly registered as acts of persuasion.
In this scene, the rhetorical threat begins with the Third King’s successfully persuading
Campeius of his nation’s ingratitude. Ingratitude fosters resentment and hate, and eventually, retaliation. In fact, the greatest rhetorical threat in this scene is that which we never see, but are only told will happen: Campeius’s plans to write against his country from abroad. His dissemination of hate will ultimately fuel others to act. The Third King influences the Englishman; the Englishman writes from abroad; and, both of these represent a form of dangerous foreign influence.
Dekker’s emphasis on rhetorical acts of aggression (oral and written) as a kind of foreign threat is present even as the play moves to the most famous of Elizabethan incidents, the Spanish Armada of 1588. While the play’s final scenes involving the
Armada form a kind of climax in the string of threats that define the play, Dekker insists that converted Englishmen continue to pose a threat to the state. The internal spy and would-be assassin Paridell (William Parry) is given access to the queen. Although
Titania suspects he may be affiliated with those who seek her life, she is surprised when he attempts to stab her. Even after Paridell is detained by Titania’s counsellors, he feels authorized to commit murder against her.
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yet her murder
Cannot be named bloud-shed, for her Faieries
Are all of faith, and fealty assoyled
The balme that her annoynted is washt off,
Her crowne is now not hers; vpon the paine
Of a blacke curse, no more must I obey her,
I climbe to heauen by this, climbe then and slay her. (I4v)
Using a logic that is reminiscent of Marlovian villainy, Paridell convinces himself that disobedience to his monarch is justified. “I climbe to heauen by this” offers the further suggestion that killing the queen will secure him martyrdom. Indeed, in 1607, as audiences viewed and/or read Dekker’s description of the motivations driving Catholic insurgency, they would have heard echoes of the official discourse used to describe and interpret the motives that fuelled the Gunpowder plotters. It is to that political context we shall now turn.
2) The VVhore of Babylon and the Official Reaction to the Gunpowder Plot
When Dekker decided to write The VVhore of Babylon is significant. By 1606,
England had experienced three years of failed plots against both king and state. The
Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605 was but the most famous in this series of averted catastrophes. 231 As William Barlow had noted in his sermon only days after the failed plot had come to light, “if fire had beene giuen, (beside the place it selfe at the which hee aymed) the Hall of Iudgement , the Courtes of Recordes, the Collegiate Church, the Cittie of Westminster , yea, White-Hall the Kinges house, had beene trushed and ouerthrowne”
231 The earlier 1603 Main and Bye Plots were similarly devised by English Catholics.
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(C3r). 232 The failed attempt by a small network of Catholics to assassinate the king and members of his leading political and ecclesiastical establishment was, for many, the climax and culmination to an ongoing historical struggle. The official printed literature related to the plot shows this. King James, the king’s Attorney General Edward Coke, and Martin Fotherby, one of the king’s bishops, adopted a common Renaissance discourse of biblical types and historical analogues to interpret the Gunpowder Plot, a discourse in which past examples served as precedent for explaining the recent atrocities posed against the state. Dekker’s understanding of crisis in The VVhore of Babylon follows this discourse closely, as each threat against the state—each individual act of treason—is understood as part of an interconnected conspiracy. But it is in how Dekker defines Tudor crisis, particularly his emphasis on rhetorical acts of deception, that his
Tudor literary subject engages directly with the Stuart political moment.
Four hundred years later, modern historians continue to debate the unsolved mysteries of the Gunpowder Plot. Was it domestic terrorism, or was it backed by foreign support? Who was the mastermind of the plot to blow up Parliament and what were his motives for doing so? Perhaps most exciting of all: was the Gunpowder Plot a government ploy managed by King James and his top officials in order to generate support for political interests ranging from union to church reform? 233 Tempting as it may be, however, to enter another theory (conspiracy or otherwise) about who or what was behind the Gunpowder Plot, this section will examine how the bishops and lawyers,
232 Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the Tenth day of Nouember being the Next Sunday after the Discouerie of this Late Horrible Treason (London, 1605) STC 1455. 233 For different assessments of the Gunpowder Plot see especially Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason. The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Doubleday, 1996) and Alice Hogge, God’s Secret Agents. Queen Elizabeth’s Secret Agents and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). Similar to the equivalent early modern investigators and commentaries, these three studies look repeatedly to the Elizabethan past to make sense of the Gunpowder Plot.
157 even the king himself, conceptualized the plot in the immediate months following the arrest of Guy Fawkes, and how the government speeches, trial reports and sermons produced by top state and church officials shed light on the discourses used in The
VVhore of Babylon . First, however, we need to examine the existing political interpretations of the play.
Previous attempts at discerning a connection between Dekker’s The VVhore of
Babylon and the Gunpowder Plot started with Daniel B. Dobson’s short note of 1959.
Dobson was the first to spot potential allusions to the Gunpowder Plot in the play, including the Third King’s dictum, “when mines are to be blowne vp, men dig low” (1.1.
113), and the Empresse’s warning to Campieus, “to make her stumble: if that bloud- hound hunt you /…Flie with the batt vnder the eeues of night, /And shift your neasts: or like to Ancresses / Close vp your selues in artificiall wals” (3.1. 153, 158–160). 234
Scholars have accepted these lines in the play as references pertaining to the particular stratagems of the 1605 plotters. The plotters attempted to blow up the parliament using mines which were stored behind artificial walls constructed beneath parliament. But beyond these topical allusions, how else does the play respond to the Gunpowder Plot?
Only since the 1990s have critics studied the intricacies of Dekker’s advanced political-religious message in its cultural context. Early twentieth-century assessments of
The VVhore of Babylon by F.G. Fleay, Felix Schelling and Mary Leland Hunt 235 were critical of the play’s seemingly incoherent structure, and its mixture of literary modes.
234 “Allusions to the Gunpowder Plot in Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon ,” Notes and Queries 204 (1959): 257. See also Susan E. Krantz, “Identifying Dekker’s Third King in The Whore of Babylon ,” American Notes and Queries , NS. 3 (1990): 104–106. 235 The relevant discussions are found in Fleay, The Biographical Chronicle , 2 vols. (London, 1891) 1: 132–133; Schelling, The English Chronicle Play (New York, 1902) 238–241; Hunt, Thomas Dekker, A Study (1911, rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964) 36–42.
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Following the publication of Bowers’s edition of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker in 1955, scholars started to pay more attention to Dekker’s intentions, even though they often reached the same conclusions as these earlier critics. For example, Irving Ribner’s suggestion that Dekker attempted to court “the favour of James I by expressing political doctrine with which the King was closely concerned”236 anticipated more recent readings of the play, and yet his characterization of the play as “disjointed and episodic”, “an ill- advised experiment for the Tudor history play genre” (283, 286), reflects earlier, derogatory, pre-1950s readings of the play.
Only with Julia Gasper’s chapter and Susan E. Kratz’s article do we begin to witness a turning point in the critical reception of the play. 237 Gasper’s seminal survey on
The VVhore of Babylon , which I will return to in the final section of this chapter, demonstrates the significance of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition as a context for interpreting the play’s treatment of Elizabeth’s life and reign. Additionally, Kratz’s treatment of the play as a political commentary, a socio-political document enagaged with the state reaction to the Gunpowder Plot, offered a crucial Stuart context for
Dekker’s treatment of the Tudor past. Gasper and Krantz accepted the play’s idiosyncratic aesthetic as related to its early modern messages.
According to Krantz, “Dekker’s selection and manipulation of events used in the
Whore of Babylon ” is designed to “ensure audience recognition and interpretation of the
236 The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (1957; London: Methuen, 1965) 283. For a similar mixed assessment, see Larry S. Champion, Thomas Dekker and the Traditions of English Drama (New York: Peter Lang, 1985) 75, 80. 237 Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) 62–108; Susan E. Krantz, “Thomas Dekker’s Political Commentary in The Whore of Babylon ,” SEL 35.2 (1995): 271–291. Both Gasper’s and Kratz’s readings build upon the important editorial work found in Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in “The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker ,” 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 2: 300–383.
159 play’s contemporary political messages.” 238 Krantz argues that The VVhore of Babylon represents a “politically oppositional text,” one that challenges and undermines the official Stuart political and legal interpretation of the Gunpowder Plot. In her view,
Dekker’s play contradicts the king’s and his Attorney General’s denial of state- sanctioned, foreign involvement, particularly James’s “attempts to disassociate Spain from the Gunpowder Plot” (275). Instead, she suggests that the play supports a militant
Protestant understanding of the event, a view that holds all acts of Catholic oppression, past and present, as indistinguishable from one another. If the play represents an
“oppositional text,” in that it counters the king’s prerogative, it supports an alternative to the political-religious crisis by supporting a militant Protestantism, backed by James’s son, Prince Henry.
Krantz’s complex argument correctly asserts that we read the play in relation to the “political discourse resulting from the discovery of the treason” (272). Her brief examination of James’s The King’s Book (1605) provides a case in point. This edition, which includes James’s initial speech to Parliament after the Plot, offers a powerful, interpretive framework for the crisis, and it provides an essential contextual source for
Dekker’s play. Indeed, Krantz’s treatment of the play as political commentary, and her insistence on reading the play in light of contemporary sources, is what distinguishes her article from other criticism on the play. Krantz’s methods are sound; however, her conclusions are less convincing. First, the article’s cursory treatment of the official writings on the Gunpowder Plot results in an incomplete reading of the state reaction to the plot, and, as a result, in a misunderstanding of how Dekker’s political commentary ultimately functions. Second, if Dekker designed his play as an oppositional text, as
238 Krantz, “Thomas Dekker’s Political Commentary” 272.
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Krantz suggests, would the Jacobean censors have allowed it to be staged and printed?
Surely an encoded political critique, directed against the state, on a subject as controversial as the Gunpowder Plot, and so soon after the event, would have been labelled subversive. Did Dekker really use his play to challenge the king? Looking at an official sermon, parliamentary speech, and trial report, all associated with the Gunpowder
Plot, I will demonstrate that Dekker’s play actually adopts the rhetoric employed in the official reaction to the Plot, and that his political commentary validates rather than opposes the state’s response to the Plot.
On the fifth of November 1607, Martin Fotherby (later Bishop of Salisbury) gave the second annual Gunpowder Plot Sermon at Paul’s Cross. Like William Barlow in his sermon a year earlier, Fotherby used the occasion to comment on the nature of providential deliverance, before offering thanksgiving to God for the king’s and the country’s escape from this averted catastrophe. 239 In his reflections, Fotherby made a connection other contemporaries had overlooked or perhaps had chosen not to make. At the midpoint of the sermon, Fotherby stopped to allude to an earlier national crisis, what he would describe as “the first deliuerance.” It was, he explained:
that same wonderfull deliuerance which from heauen was sent vnto
vs, in that wonderfull yeere of Anno. 1588 …. A benefit whose
memory ought neuer to die amongst vs, neuer to decay. For though
wee now be at one with that nation, which at that time most earnestly
endeauoured our destruction; it followeth not that . . . [we should forget]
239 For discussions of the Gunpowder Plot Sermons in Stuart England, see Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court. Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 118–125; Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic. James I, the King’s Preachers and the Rhetorics of Conformity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 64–109.
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the great mercy and goodness of God towards vs. (L3r) 240
“That nation” Fotherby referred to was Spain, a country which had fought a decades-long war with England prior to 1604. One of James’s hallmark accomplishments as English king was the Spanish peace he reached in his first year in office, although not all were in agreement that such a truce was in order, especially with a Catholic power. High-ranking members of the English Commons, including men like Thomas Hoby, argued that the new peace with Spain threatened long-standing commitments to international
Protestantism. 241 Hoby was not alone in his resentment over the peace reached in August
1604, and he and other English contemporaries were doubly fortified in their convictions after the Gunpowder Plot came to light.
Fotherby’s connection of the failed attack by the Spanish Armada in 1588 with the “domestic-based” Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is something of a mismatch, as the
Armada resulted from foreign war, while the Gunpowder Plot resulted, according to the
English government, from domestic terrorism. Nevertheless, the “deliverances” of 5
November and “ Anno 1588” would become historical turning points etched into the national consciousness, annual occasions for celebrating “the great mercy and goodness of God towards vs.” Fotherby’s sermon already carried “national” significance since the
Commons had declared 5 November an official holiday in 1606. Official decree helped pave the way for Fotherby’s explicit and Dekker’s implicit connection of these Tudor and
Stuart crises. 242 Even in this passage, Fotherby relied on an earlier writer’s reaction to
240 Foure Sermons . . . The Third at Paul’s Crosse, Vpon the Day of Our Deliverance from the Gun-Powder Treason November 5 Anno. 1607 (London, 1608) STC 11206. 241 See Andrew Thrush, “The Parliamentary Opposition to Peace with Spain in 1604,” Parliamentary History 23.3 (2004): 301–315. 242 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989) offers a full consideration of contemporary responses to both the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot.
162 the Gunpowder Plot. In his reference to the Armada as a “first deliuerance in the waters”
(as opposed to the fire-based Gunpowder plot), Fotherby adopted a comparison made by no less a figure than the king himself. James’s speech to Parliament only four days after the Gunpowder Plot set an important precedent for writers responding to the events of 5
November 1605 immediately following the event. James made it clear to his assembly that this recent attempt to destroy him, his family, and the state and church officials was a crime of epic proportions. To capture the magnitude of the offence, he looked, as he so often did, to the Bible. James turned to the beginning of the Old Testament and the end of the New Testament, what he called the “two great and fearefull doomes-dayes”
(B1v). 243 The first “doomsday” was the great flood that wiped away all of the earth’s inhabitants with the exception of Noah and his family. James described this destruction or providential cleansing of the world’s sins as “purgation.” But this past destruction was the lesser of the two “doomesdayes.” That which was still to come, the Apocalypse, would prove less forgiving, for it would be a “general destruction” by fire (B1r–v).
Fortunately, James noted, the Gunpowder Plot was more like Noah’s flood; it was more a
“purgation” than a “general destruction.”
James then introduced new typological analogies, but this time he used secular examples. The “thundering sinne of fire and brimstone, from the which God hath deliuered us all” (B2r) led James to evoke the many assassination attempts conducted against him, from the time “I was in my mother’s belly” to more recent plots. In this brief digression James focused his attention on two treasons, the Gowrie Plot of 1600 and
243 His Majesties Speech in the Last Session of Parliament . . . Together with a Discourse of the Manner of the Discovery (London, 1605) STC 14393. This speech, along with the narrative account that follows it, is commonly referred to as the King’s Book. All quotations are from the first of three printings issued in 1605, and are cited parenthetically.
163 the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The way he articulated the differences between the attempts on his life reflects the earlier distinctions he made between the “two domesdays.” The
Gowrie Plot was conceived out of spite and revenge. It was personal. But the Gunpowder
Plot was the byproduct of religious conviction; and it was planned against those who had no connection with the lives of the offenders. The indiscriminate nature of the act troubled James, and it was religion, the justification for the act, that dominated the remainder of the speech. We will return to James’s speech momentarily, but it is worth noting that he articulated national crisis in a way similar to that found in The VVhore of
Babylon . His use of biblical and secular analogies to connect past with present crisis, a rhetorical approach that reads history in providential terms, reflects how Dekker conceptualizes the series of crises from Elizabeth’s reign. Each failed insurrection against the state forms a link in a long chain of treasonous affronts. Indeed, this conceptualization of the Catholic threat formed the basis for Edward Coke’s indictment against the conspirators.
Fotherby’s use of the same imagery of water and fire found in James’s speech accords with Renaissance conventions of imitation; his revision of James’s analogy is made with the expectation that his audience will hear the slightly altered discourse as one first used by the king. The typological framework employed in both James’s sermon-like speech to parliament and Fotherby’s sermon is also present in the proceedings against those accused in the Gunpowder Plot. As we analyze the language used by Coke at the trial, we once again see an examination of present crisis through past examples. As with
Dekker’s play, Fotherby’s sermon, and James’s speech to Parliament, Coke’s legal proceedings for the Gunpowder Plot adopts a historical approach to articulating crisis.
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Edward Coke, the king’s Attorney General, referred to the Gunpowder Plot as one of “the greatest treasons that euer were plotted in England” (D2r), “as without example in fact and fiction” (D3v), and yet Coke would insist that this recent plot was part of a long line of former treasons: “Now as this powder Treason is in it selfe prodigious and vnnaturall, so is it in the Conception and Birth most monstrous, as arising out of the dead ashes of former Treasons” (E1r). 244 Coke described the recent treason using the famous myth of the phoenix, the mythical bird that never dies, but rather regenerates out of its own fiery ashes. As we might expect from a lawyer at trial, Coke turned to precedents to prosecute the accused. In his arraignment of Henry Garnet, the head of the English Jesuits, Coke began by referring to the man’s return to England in
1586. Hindsight helped Coke “prove” that the Gunpowder Plot was the most recent failed attempt by Jesuits against the state, and that Garnet was involved in many of the plots against the crown over the last twenty years. Garnet, much like Campeius in The
VVhore of Babylon , proves dangerous for Coke because he spreads ideas to undermine the state position on religion. For Coke, the actions of Garnet and others are inextricably tied to doctrines upheld by the Catholic Church.
Included among Coke’s accusations against Garnet and the other conspirators was his condemnation of a particular doctrine. According to Coke, Garnet and other Jesuits supported the doctrine of equivocation; the Attorney General proceeded to cite examples from a recently printed book on the topic, “seen and allowed by Garnet, the superiour of the Iesuits” (I1r). In it Catholics are, according to Coke, shown how to delude and lie to the English authorities, especially when placed under question. These “treasonous books”
244 A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings (London, 1606) STC 11619a. This is but one of four issues printed in 1606. All quotations are cited parenthetically.
165 helped Coke to suggest the actions of the conspirators were inspired by Jesuit ideology, and ultimately to Roman Catholicism. Indeed, in his catalogue of past treasons against the state he does not distinguish between domestic and foreign enterprises: “They had all one end, and that was the Romish Catholicke cause. . . .The same meanes, by Popish and discontented Persons, Priests and lay men” (K1r).
In his discussion of A True and Perfect Relation , Arthur F. Marotti notes that
“what is surprising” about the work “is the limited attention it gives to the agency of the lay plotters. From the start it is focused on the Jesuits and the larger history of Catholic subversion, plotting, and (attempted or actual) political assassination.” 245 Marotti’s trenchant analysis of A True and Perfect Relation supports my argument that the response to the Gunpowder Plot, and the articulation of crisis in this period in general, emphasized a foreign presence as source: Jesuit ideology.
This connection between individual acts and foreign ideas forms one of the most interesting sections of James’s speech. Nearing the end of his speech to Parliament, already cited, James considered the motives of the men involved in the powder treason.
He advised the parliamentarians to be cautious in their judgement:
For although it cannot bee denied, That it was the onely blind superstition
of their errors in Religion, that led them to this desperate deuise, yet doeth
it not follow, That all professing that Romish religion were guilty of the
same. (C2r)
245 Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy. Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) 134.
166
Critics, including Krantz and William Tollemache 246 cite this passage to suggest James opted for political appeasement by carefully distinguishing between good and bad
Catholics. Yet, it is important to note that James’s final words emphasized the faults of the “ Romish ” religion:
For as it is true, That no other sect of heretiques, not excepting Turke , Iew ,
nor Pagan , no not euen those of Calicute , who adore the deuill, did ever
maintaine by the grounds of their Religion, That it was lawfull, or rather
meritorious (as the Romish Catholics call it) to murther Princes or people
for quarrell of Religion. (C2r)
James’s condemnation of the church’s sanctioning of regicide reminds us of Paridell in the final scene of Dekker’s play. What proves most frightening about Paridell is not that he seeks Elizabeth’s life but that he cites religion to justify his actions. After reflecting on the actions taken by the plotters, and the religious ideology that sanctioned those actions, James ends:
I therefore thus doe conclude this point, That as vpon the one part many
honest men, seduced with some errors of Popery, may yet remain good
and faithfull subiects. So vpon the other part, none of those that truely
know and beleeue the whole grounds, and Schoole conclusions of their
doctrine, can euer proue either good Christians or faithfull Subiects. (C2v)
James’s final words are telling, for they suggest that those English Catholics knowledgeable of and in support of the doctrines of the Catholic Church in full cannot be faithful subjects. What begins as an important distinction ends in ultimatum: conform or
246 Tollemache, “The Whore of Babylon in English Reformation literature, 1547–1660,” diss., New York U, 1999, 265–301, compares the play and the King’s Book in detail.
167 else. That ultimatum would become state doctrine with the introduction of the Oath of
Allegiance in 1606. In 1605, James was still uncertain how to respond to this national crisis, and this speech, produced only four days after the event, shows some of that indecision. James’s neat division of those corrupted by specific Roman Catholic doctrines from full Roman Catholics becomes problematic by the end of the passage. As with Coke, who begins by trying individuals only to end in a larger critique of
Catholicism, James too seems to forget the particular actions of a few men as he considers the source of the conspiracy.
It is this connection we need to heed when reading Dekker’s play. For playgoers and 1607 readers of The VVhore of Babylon experienced a version of the Tudor past that would have been eerily familiar. They were not simply reading a history of Elizabeth’s reign; they were experiencing a variation of Coke’s and James’s analogy-based, typologically-framed conceptualization of the latest Stuart crisis. When we consider the similarities between the official post-Gunpowder Plot rhetoric and the discourse used in the play, it seems difficult to concur with Krantz’s suggestion that Dekker’s play functions as “one of the first generation of texts to recast Elizabethan England nostalgically as a covert criticism of the contemporary Jacobean court” (271), a play wherein
the simplistic and singular identification of Roman Catholicism
with every assassination attempt in England since the Reformation
and his conflation of Roman Catholicism with Spain contradict
both court policy and the evidence amassed on the conspiracy.
(273)
168
Krantz’s consideration of the play’s treatment of the Elizabethan history and her examination of the state’s response to the Gunpowder Plot do not adequately acknowledge the overlap in the language used by dramatist, lawyer, minister, and king, not to mention the similar links these writers and speakers made between domestic acts and foreign ideas. Moreover, Krantz minimizes the importance of the Apocalypse as an essential source for reading politics in the play. If individual acts form the basis for much of Dekker’s characterization of crisis in The VVhore of Babylon , it is the Apocalypse that provides the source for interpreting those acts.
3. The VVhore of Babylon and the English Apocalyptic Tradition
In The VVhore of Babylon , domestic terrorism and international war are understood as products of a larger evil described in the prophecies of the Bible. As Julia
Gasper suggests, although the play portrays “recent events in England, it depicts the struggle between the true church and her enemy in international and apocalyptic terms.” 247 But what did the Apocalypse mean to Dekker, how is it manifested in the play, and what relationship does it have to Dekker’s political message?
The title of Dekker’s play refers to the famous figure described in Chapter 17 of
The Book of Revelation. This last book in the New Testament often referred to as
“Apocalypse” employs a magnificent array of allegorical images to reveal the prophecy
John the Evangelist received while exiled on the Greek island of Patmos. Of greatest importance to Christians are the book’s last chapters which foretell a final battle of good and evil before the earth’s destruction (the Armageddon) and Christ’s return (the Second
Coming). Not all Christians have embraced John’s revelation equally. Erasmus found
247 Dragon and the Dove 62.
169 the book so troubling in its form and message that he questioned its apostolic and canonical status. John Bale, however, embraced it as the central book of the Bible. 248
Christian commentators from the second through the twelfth centuries interpreted the Whore of Babylon in a variety of ways, but most agreed she was a symbol of evil, an embodiment of the temptation threatening the spirit of Christian man and the church. For
Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Whore of Babylon was increasingly associated with Rome, and especially the abuses of the Roman Catholic church. These anti-papal readings of the Apocalypse were not Reformation inventions.
Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers, including Ubertino of Casale (d. c. 1329), John
Wycliffe (d.1384) and John Hus (d.1415), had already connected apocalyptic referents with various popes from different periods, while commentators including Rupert of Deutz
(d. 1129), Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) and Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1340) had established in their historical interpretations of apocalyptic imagery an important precedent for later
English writers. 249 The difference between pre- and post-Reformation readings was mainly one of popularity. Earlier anti-papal readings of the Apocalypse were predominantly the views of a minority, but after the 1530s such readings, especially those which drew a connection between the Whore and the papacy, had become commonplace.
Every feature of the Whore of Babylon, from her rose-coloured skin, to the pearls around her neck, to the crown on her head, to the scarlet robes that adorned her, was still regarded as a symbol of lust and idolatry, but also as an allegory for the ceremonies, doctrines, and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
248 Erasmus voiced his doubts in the 1516 and 1522 Annotations : the first to criticize the book’s canonical status since Dionysius in the third century. See Irena Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse , Geneva, Zurich and Wittenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) xii, 3–6. Bale comments on the centrality of the book in the Preface to his Image of Bothe Churches (c. 1545). 249 Backus, Reformation Readings xvi–xviii.
170
Dekker’s The VVhore of Babylon belongs to what by 1606 was an established, if much debated, post-Reformation commentary tradition. According to Irena Backus,
François Lambert’s 1528 publication was the first commentary on the Book of Revelation to locate references to the Reformation in the imagery of the Apocalypse. 250 Lambert’s publication coincided with Martin Luther’s new comments on the controversial book. In his prefaces to Revelation for the September and December New Testaments, both of which were published in 1522, Luther expressed doubts over the canonical status of
Revelation and criticized its theology, claiming “Christ is neither taught nor known by it.” 251 In 1528, Luther commissioned the printing of a fourteenth-century commentary on
Revelation. The re-discovered manuscript helped to convince Luther that John’s
Apocalypse prophesized specific, historical events, especially the acts of oppression recorded throughout ancient and recent history. The controversy surrounding the book’s canonical status, which had preoccupied Luther in 1522, was all but forgotten eight years later. 252 In his updated and expanded 1530 “Preface to Revelation,” Luther, like Lambert before him, encouraged the faithful to read the past through Revelation’s mysteries:
Since it is intended as a revelation of things that are to happen in
the future, and especially of tribulations and disasters that were to
come upon Christendom, we consider that the first and surest step
towards finding its interpretation is to take from history the events
250 Lambert, Exegeseos… Diui Ioannis (Marburg, 1528; Basel, 1539) is discussed in Backus, Reformation Readings 11–13. Bale’s interest in Lambert may have stretched beyond a shared commitment to the Apocalypse. Both men had been part of religious orders (for Lambert, the Franciscans, and for Bale, the Carmelites) before converting to Protestantism. Backus, Reformation Readings 11; Peter Happé, John Bale, Twayne’s English Author Series, 520 (New York: Twayne, 1996) 2–5. 251 “Preface to the Revelation of St. John [1] 1522,” Luther’s Works , 55 vols., ed. E. Theodore Bachmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955) 35: 399. 252 Luther’s comments are found in the preface to Commentarius in apocalypsin ante centum annos aeditus (1528). See Backus, Reformation Readings 7.
171
and disasters that have come upon Christendom till now, and hold
them up alongside of these images and so compare them very
carefully. 253
Luther’s choice to compare recorded events—particularly those connected to the Roman
Catholic Church—against the textual images in the Apocalypse provided an important precedent for future commentators. 254 It also offered encouragement to writers convinced the Apocalypse proved that the papacy was really one of the secret workings of
Antichrist. 255
For instance, English Protestants who followed Luther’s prefatory advice became increasingly convinced that John’s Apocalypse foretold of the sectarian divisions brought about by the Reformation. “He that not knoweth this book,” wrote John Bale, “knoweth not what the Church is whereof he is a member” (A3r–v). Membership for Bale was
253 “Preface to the Revelation of St. John [2] 1546 (1530),” Luther’s Works , ed. E. Theodore Bachmann, vol. 35 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955) 401. For discussion of the September and December Testaments, see John L. Flood, “Martin Luther’s Bible: Translation in its German and European Context,” The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries , ed. Richard Griffiths (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) 44–45. 254 One way of insisting that comparisons drawn between image and word be done very carefully was by ensuring that if the images described in Revelation were illustrated they followed the text to the letter. Pre- Reformation illustrations of the Apocalypse had often taken great liberty with their pictorial representations as they interpolated or ignored altogether the imagery found in the Biblical text. But the twenty-two woodcuts (one corresponding to each chapter of the Apocalypse) executed by Lucas Cranach the Elder for Luther’s Testament broke away from this tradition by insisting on following the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura . Peter Parshall has argued convincingly that Cranach the Elder’s illustrations, while based on Durer’s famous woodcut cycle of the Apocalypse, captured Luther’s insistence that “images must adhere faithfully to the word” (103). English Reformers endorsed Luther’s idea of sola scriptura in the centuries to follow (if not always in their illustrations to Revelation), and seemed especially anxious to read Revelation historically. Peter Parshall, “The Vision of the Apocalypse in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come , ed. Frances Carey (London: British Museum Press, 1999) 103. For discussion of Durer’s cycle, Luther’s views on the use of images, as well as samples from Cranach’s cuts for both the September and December Testaments of 1522, see 100–106, 143–146. One of the few polemical gestures in the September Testament that went beyond “the word” was the inclusion of a papal tiara on the whore of Babylon in the illustrations from chapter 17. This was to be censored in the December Testament. Flood, “Martin Luther’s Bible” 50–59. 255 On this connection see Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England . rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1990); Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978) 91–112.
172 limited to the elect; in the Image of Bothe Churches (c. 1545) Bale demonstrated how the
Apocalypse provided a window to generations of “true” and “false” Christians waging battles similar to the ones that engulfed sixteenth-century Europe. Bale then traced these struggles along a timeline made up of seven periods of church history. While he recorded the battles waged between the true and false churches, he was reluctant (as John Foxe was in his interpretation of the Apocalypse in the Actes and Monuments two decades later) to use apocalyptic imagery to predict events. Nevertheless, Bale was convinced that the Reformation represented a “sixth” period, and that the “seventh” period would usher in the eventual overthrow of the Roman Catholic Church. 256
The VVhore of Babylon adopts Bale’s ideological division of the two churches as the model for structuring the history of Elizabethan England. Dekker’s understanding of
Tudor history requires the linking of specific events to apocalyptic images and ideas.
Indeed, much of the language present in The VVhore of Babylon derives from the English
Geneva Bible, a work which contained one of the most influential, if constantly changing, commentaries on the apocalypse produced after Bale’s Image.
5. Dekker’s Use of the Apocalypse
In The VVhore of Babylon , the Empresse of Babylon (Rome) questions the Third
King (Spain) as to why she is hated. The king replies by turning repeatedly to the text
256 Bale composed his Image in exile between 1541 and 1547. Early printed copies include the 1548 and 1550 octavos, STC 1297–1298. For discussion of Bale’s approach to the Apocalypse, including the sources he consulted, see Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 32–68 and John N. King, English Reformation Literature, The Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 61–64, 155–56. Bale’s schema of seven periods of church history reflects the divisional framework first used by Bede, but his application of those seven stages of time was based on the later Joachimite tradition. Bale’s full understanding of the Apocalypse was the product of a variety of commentaries and traditions. See Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse 21–33. On Bede and Joachim, see Backus, Reformation Readings xiv–xv.
173 and commentary of 17.4 of the Book of Revelation. “They call you,” the king explains,
“the superstitious harlot: purple whore . . . / the great whore that on many waters sitteth, which they call many nations” (H3v). The king’s reference to “waters” is consistent with the verses printed in the three major editions of the English translation of the Geneva
Bible; whereas, his reference to “nations” is present only as a gloss to the 1560 edition. 257
The king continues:
They say the robes of purple which you weare,
Your scarlet veiles, and mantle are not giuen you
As types of honour and regality
But dyed so deepe with blood vpon them spilt,
And that (all or’e) y’are with red murder gilt: (H3v)
257 Although the English translation of the Geneva Bible was based on earlier Latin and French editions produced by a team led by John Calvin’s disciple, Théodore de Bèze, and then compiled and translated by English Marian exiles resident in Geneva, much of the translation followed William Tyndale’s edition of the New Testament. Of all the Bibles printed in England before the Authorized (1611)—The Coverdale (1535), The Great (1539), The Bishops’ (1568)—the various editions of the English Geneva Bible proved most popular. One reason for this was its size. The Coverdale, The Great and The Bishops’ were predominately large folios authorized to be read in church, whereas the Geneva quarto editions were designed for private study. Portable, affordable and readable, the Geneva Bibles also came with extensive paratexts: illustrations, concordances, tables, and marginal commentaries designed to assist readers with their interpretations. One of the hallmark features of the Geneva editions was the extensive notes used as commentary to the text. Most notes in the Geneva Bible are explanatory (a combination of cross-references and definitions designed to assist readers with the basic meaning of the text), but some notes are polemical, including those for the Book of Revelation. Any discussion of the Book of Revelation in the English Geneva Bible should take account of the three states of the notes used in each of the 1560, 1576 and 1602 editions. The first set of notes was printed by the English stationer Rowland Hall for the first edition of the Geneva Bible in 1560. These notes were based on existing commentaries by Bèze, Heinrich Bullinger and John Bale. For discussion of the Geneva Bible translators, editions and register, see David Daniell, The Bible In English, Its History and Influence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003) 291– 319. For discussions of Tyndale’s language and its influence, see Daniell, “Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 1–12; and Daniell, “William Tyndale, The English Bible, and the English Language,” The Bible as Book, The Reformation , ed. Orlaith O’Sullivan (London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press in association with The Scriptorium Centre for Christian Antiquities, 2000) 39–50. On the commentary notes found in the various Geneva editions, see Daniell, The Bible in English 291–319, 348–357, 369–375 and Maurice S. Betteridge, “The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and its Annotations,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14.1 (1983): 41–62.
174
Here the Third King associates the Whore’s purple and scarlet attire with the bloodshed of murder. Readers familiar with the commentaries in the Geneva Bible, or the smaller
Geneva-inspired commentaries on Revelation, 258 would have interpreted this as a reference to the blood of Protestant saints. Other references in this scene, including the cup full of “wine sophisticated” (H3v) and the “letters misticall” inscribed on the
Whore’s forehead (H4r), derive from this translation. 259 Dekker’s description of the
Whore of Babylon veers between the explicit polemical identifications found in the glosses of the 1560 commentary and the implicit identifications made in the glosses to the
1602 commentary. 260 Furthermore, the king’s description of the Whore is deliberately constructed as others’ interpretations: “they say”, “they call you”, “they interpret” are all
258 The Third King’s description of the Whore and the Empresse’s description of her wounds reflect the language used in the earliest of the Geneva commentaries. And while it is likely Dekker consulted one of these editions, he may not have, for many separately-authored 4 o and 8 o commentaries on Revelation printed between 1560 and 1607 reproduced the same Geneva text as well as many of the accompanying notes found in the Geneva Bibles and New Testaments. Some of these smaller, cheaper editions offered readers detailed paraphrases of the text, extensive scholarly notes, and—especially important for Dekker’s play—more applications of scripture to history. Earlier commentaries by John Bale and translations of continental sermons on the Apocalypse by Heinrich Bullinger were reprinted in London throughout the 1560s and 1570s; newer commentaries by William Fulke, John Foxe, Hugh Broughton and John Napier appeared between the 1570s and 1590s, and even more commentaries appeared from Francius Junius, George Gifford, and Thomas Brightman between 1590 and the publication of Dekker’s play in 1607. John Bale’s Image was first published in Antwerp in c.1545; subsequent editions were printed in 1550 and 1570. STC 1296.5–1301; Bullinger, A Hundred Sermons Vpon the Apocalypse , trans. J. Daus (London, 1561 and 1573) STC 4061–4062; Marlorat, A Catholicke Exposition Upon the Revelation of Saint John , trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1574) STC 17408; Fulke, Praelections Vpon the Sacred and Holy Reuelation of Saint John , trans. G. Gyfford (London, 1573) STC 11443; Gifford, Sermons Vpon the Whole Book of Religion (London, 1596 and 1599) STC 11866–11867; Jacobo Brocardo, The Reuelation of St. John Reuealed , trans. J. Sanford (London, 1582 and 1610) STC 3810–3810.5; Napier, A Plaine Discouery (Edinburgh, 1593, 1594; London, 1611) STC 18354–18356a; Brightman, A Reuelation of the Apocalypse , (London, 1611, 1615 and 1616) STC 3754–3756, Dent, Ruine of Rome (London, 1603, 1609, 1612, 1622, 1628, 1631, 1633) STC 6640–6646.2; Perkins, Lecture Vpon the First Three Chapters of the Reuelation to which is added…A Sermon in which is Proued Rome is Babylon and that Babylon is fallen (London, 1604, 1606 and 1607) STC 19731–19732a. For discussions of several of these commentaries, see especially Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition and Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse . 259 In addition to the Geneva Bible, Hoy points to the writings of Bale and William Fulke as possible sources for Dekker’s description of the Whore in this scene. See Introductions , 359–362. 260 I have consulted a variety of Geneva Bibles at the Fisher Rare Book Library, including two 1560 first editions (and a 1608 reprint), a 1587 Tomson edition and several Geneva-Tomson-Junius editions, including a 1609 reprint of the 1602 Geneva-Tomson-Junius.
175 references made in the third person. What the king does not make explicit is that this description follows closely sections of the text and commentary of the English Geneva
Bible. “They” refers to the many Protestant editors and commentators who have analyzed and interpreted the Whore.
Dekker’s description and interpretation of the Whore of Babylon is from
Revelation, 17:1–4. In the 1560, 1576, and 1602 editions, the translation of the text varies little, except for variation in spelling, but the commentaries differ significantly. In the first verse, John is shown the Whore of Babylon by “one of the seuen Angels”. The scripture then proceeds as follows:
I will shewe thee
the damnation of the great whore that sitteth vpon many waters.
With whome haue committed fornica-
tion the kings of the earth, and the inhabitants
of the earth are drunken with the wine of her
fornication.
So he caried me away into the wilder-
nesse in the Spirit, and I saw a woman sit vpon
a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blas-
phemie, which had seuen head and ten hornes.
176
And the woman was arayed in purple
and scarlet, and gilded with gold, and precious
stones, and pearles, and had a cup of gold in
her hand full of abomination, and filthinesse of
her fornication. 261
Next, we are informed of the “mystery” written on the Whore’s forehead (17:5) and how she is “drunken with the blood of Saints” (6). We then receive a description of the beast with seven heads (which represent seven mountains) and ten horns (which represent ten kings). These ten horns/kings will swear allegiance to “the beast” (13) only to “hate” her later (16). The chapter ends: “And that woman which thou sawest, is that great citie which reigned ouer the kings of the earth” (18). John’s description of the Whore holds consequences for all Christians because, we are told, her future arrival on Earth will be a day of reckoning, for “they that dwell on the earth shall wonder (whose names are not written in the booke of life from the foundation of the world)” (8). John’s pronouncement in the eighth verse reminds us of the prophetic signs within this largely descriptive chapter. For all its horrific imagery, Chapter 17 nevertheless provided a sense of assurance for many Protestants, as it identified a clear enemy in the papacy, while it promised protection for the elect members of the true church.
That Dekker has the Empresse and the King of Spain replay through question and answer this famous description from the Book of Revelation is significant, since, for a brief moment, the play’s allegory of Tudor history halts, so that we may reflect on the larger biblical significance of earthly crisis. Much like the interplay between text and
261 I quote from the 1602 facsimile edition. All quotations are cited parenthetically.
177 commentary in the English Geneva editions, this descriptive scene acts as a kind of exegesis to the previous moments of Elizabethan crisis. This most explicit appropriation of apocalyptic language and imagery in the play serves to define the threat that gives the play its title, and yet it is but one of several kinds of apocalyptic logic at work in The
VVhore of Babylon . In addition to using apocalyptic language to define the threats against the Tudor state, Dekker turned to the apocalypse to measure the relationship between particular threats over time. This temporal assessment of crisis is also rooted in the commentaries of the Geneva edition of the Book of Revelation, and corresponds with how investigators of the Gunpowder Plot connected past and present crises.
What I have been suggesting thus far, and what I will continue to argue, is that
Dekker’s approach to history, politics and religion in the play depended upon his audience’s knowledge of specific early modern discourses. Only by contextualizing the play within the English post-Reformation apocalyptic tradition do we fully experience the play’s stance on political-religious crisis. Indeed, Dekker’s reading of history by way of the Apocalypse not only influences how he describes his subject matter but also how he relates that subject to the past, present, and future.
This application of the Apocalypse to secular history surfaces in Dekker’s use of the words “wound,” “woundes” and “wounded” as they appear throughout
The VVhore of Babylon .262 One of these uses occurs in the section just discussed. Once the Third King explains to the Empresse why she is detested, the Empresse replies, “Goe on: the searching small wounds is no paine” (H3v). At first glance this appears to be nothing more than a scoff, the equivalent of “their words don’t hurt me.” But the
262 Throughout the play there are sixteen occurrences of the word “wound” in its various grammatical forms.
178
Empresse’s use of the word “wounds” carries with it specific apocalyptic connotations present in the commentaries of the various editions of the Geneva Bible. Following the prologue and dumbshow which open the play, the Empresse of Babylon delivers a rousing speech on the changing fortunes of her Empire, after an interchange with the three kings, with reference to wounds:
THat we, in pompe, in peace, in god-like splendor,
With adoration of all dazeled eies,
Should breath thus long, and grow so full of daies,
Be fruitfull as the Vine, in sonnes and daughters,
(All Emperors, Kings, and Queenes) that (like to Cedars
Vprising from the breast of Lybanus ,
Or Oliues nurst vp by Ierusalem )
Heightened our glories, whilst we held vp them:
That this vast Globe Terrestriall should be cantled,
And almost three parts ours, and that the nations,
Who suspiration draw out of this aire,
With vniuersall Aues , showtes, and cries,
Should vs acknowledge to be head supreame
To this great body (for a world of yeares:)
Yet now, when we had made our Crowne compleat,
And clos’d it strongly with a triple arch,
And had inrich’d it with those pretious iewels
Few Princes euer see (white haires) euen now
179
Our greatnesse hangs in ballance, and the stampe
Of our true Soueraignty, clipt, and abas’d. (A4r)
The “fruitfull” days when all “nations” pledged their allegiance to the Empresse as “head supreame” are, as the Empresse tells us, under threat, but it is the three kings (allegories for France, Rome and Spain) who tease out the source of the Empire’s changing fortunes:
2. King Who i’st bright Empresse,
That feeds so vlcerous, and so ranke a Spleene?
Empr. A woman.
Omn. VVoman! Who?
Empr. The Fairie Queene:
Fiue Summers haue scarce drawn their glimmering nights
Through the Moons siluer bowe, since the crownd heads
Of that adored beast, on which we ride,
Were strucke and wounded, but so heal’d againe,
The very scarres were hid. But now, a mortall,
An vnrecouerable blovv is taken,
And it must bleed to death. (A4v)
The Empresse identifies the Faerie Queene as the source of the Empire’s decline, but then proceeds to refer to a wound once healed but now no longer treatable. That reference comes from Chapter 13 of Revelation, particularly verses 3 and 12. Chapter 13 is in many ways the companion chapter to 17, and what is hinted at in the earlier chapter is made clear only after reading the latter chapter. For instance, the seven-headed beast that the Whore of Babylon rides in Chapter 17 is here described for the first time, rising out of
180 the sea, but without any mention of her riding it. Moreover, Chapter 13 tells of a second beast, coming out of the earth, “which had two hornes like the Lambe, but…spoke like
[a] dragon” (11). For Protestant commentators such as Junius, this second beast represents the papacy or “ecclesiastical dominion,” which succeeded the earlier Empire, the first beast, “which was politicke” (n.15). While in Chapter 17 the Whore and her
Beast symbolize the two states of Rome (ancient and modern), in Chapter 13 the two states are symbolized through two beasts. The connections both within and between the chapters are typological, in that the beasts—or embodiments of evil—are distinct but connected variations of the same evil. In 13.3, that typological connection is explained through wounds:
And I sawe one of his heads as it were
Wounded to death, but his deadly wound
Was healed, and all the world wondered
And followed the Beast.
Later we are informed the second beast worshipped “the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed” (13.3 verse 12). Wounds throughout Chapter 13 represent, according to
Junius’s notes, the periods of decline which Rome (here connected to Antichrist) experienced as both a pagan empire and ecclesiastical state. In Dekker’s play, the
Empresse’s opening speech embodies this idea of decline which finds its most explicit acknowledgement in the reference to the beast that has been “strucke and wounded, but so heal’d againe.” But the Empresse’s next reference, to the “vnrecouerable blow” that
“must bleed to death” looks beyond Chapters 13 and 17 to the later books of the
Apocalypse, which tell of the eventual overthrow of the Antichrist, an eventual victory
181
(for Protestant commentators) over the Roman Catholic or “False” church. The fact that these references come at the very beginning of the play is no accident. The Empresse’s words allude to a Protestant understanding of the Apocalypse, which is central to the conflicts within the play. The ups and downs of the struggle between good and evil, truth and falsity may be chartable as a linear phenomenon, but the nature of the crisis or threat over time remains constant. Indeed, the typological structure of Revelation, where one moment helps to explain another, or where a later representation is made through reference to a previous one, is how Dekker charts Elizabethan crises. Audiences well versed in Revelation, and particularly the Geneva commentaries on Revelation would have understood this symbolism. At the least, early modern readers of the play would have been accustomed to the general typological system Dekker adopted to read Tudor crisis in 1606–1607, especially as it was prevalent in the official responses to the
Gunpowder Plot.
5. Reading the Apocalypse
It is no surprise that, in a market flooded with commentaries on Revelation,
Arthur Dent felt a certain “need” to justify his writing another exegesis on the book:
And therefore very needfull it is, That it should be expounded
againe and againe and all the Lords people made thoroughly
acquainted with it. For in this age where in we liue, this prophecie
can neuer be enough opened And beaten vpon, that all good
182
Protestants may be armed with it against future times, even as it
were with an armour of proof. (B1v) 263
One of the possible reasons for the popularity of Dent’s commentary was that it made this difficult text more accessible for lay readers. Compared to the typographically sophisticated apparatus of Napier’s text—with its mix of carefully presented columns of text, paraphrase and historical application—not to mention extensive learned endnotes 264 —Dent’s layout appears unsophisticated. At less than 300 pages, Dent’s
Ruine of Rome targeted a wider range of readers. 265
Dekker’s The VVhore of Babylon agrees with Dent’s contention that Revelation should be “expounded againe and againe.” What separates Dekker’s exposition from
Dent’s is the genre in which Apocalypse is read. Like Book 1 of Edmund Spenser’s
Faerie Queene , or John Bale’s play King Johan , Dekker’s The VVhore of Babylon appropriates and applies apocalyptic imagery, language and especially apocalyptic ideas of time to the recent Tudor past. Increasingly, in the decades between the publication of the first English Geneva Bible and Dekker’s play commentators connected recent events with apocalyptic prophecy. Writers like Napier believed the pouring of the seventh and final vial as described in Book 16 had taken place in 1541, and therefore that
Armageddon was fifty years old. Others, like Thomas Brightman, suggested that the pouring of the first three vials corresponded with events from Elizabeth’s reign. 266 Both
Bale and John Foxe had made similar gestures in their writings, while the Geneva-
263 I quote from the 1633 edition. 264 Napier, A Plaine Discouery of the Whole Revelation (1611) is discussed in Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition 138–149. 265 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 114. 266 Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition 170.
183
Thomson-Junius compilers supplied a chart that read “The Order Of Time Whereunto the
Contents of this Booke are to be Refered” (see Fig. 11). Throughout the sixteenth century, commentators traced more specific relationships between apocalyptic imagery and secular history, even though they did not always agree on the exact connections they found. Those writers with an increased interest in the historicism of Apocalypse produced some of the most intricate systems for using prophecy to calculate human history. When Dent (as just cited) refers to “opening” the “prophecy” he is pointing to the very essence of apocalyptics as genre—that is, its ability to disclose or reveal that which is hidden. The opening of the seven seals, the pouring of the seven vials, the blowing of the seven trumpets were considered by commentators as essential clues for measuring secular time. One way of unlocking these mysteries was by turning to other apocalyptic literature in the Bible and Apocrypha for additional evidence (to the Book of
Daniel, or Thessalonians, or 2 Esdras). Within this web, commentaries helped readers to arm themselves for the weighty task of exposition.
6. Apocalyptics and Politics: Final Thoughts
In providing a brief overview of how English Protestants interpreted the Book of
Revelation, I have tried to give a sense of the apocalyptic tradition from which Dekker’s
The VVhore of Babylon borrowed and to which it responded. When writing the play,
Dekker likely had a few specific books at his disposal, including a Geneva Bible or
Geneva-inspired commentary, and a copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles . It is also likely that
184 he consulted The Faerie Queene and a small pamphlet entitled Babylon is Fallen, Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs , Bale’s Image , and other apocalyptic commentaries or related polemical pamphlets. 267 Indeed, while Dekker clearly expected readers to analyze the relationship between the subject of the play and the occasion for which it was composed, he also expected audiences to decode crisis in apocalyptic terms.
Kevin Sharpe has argued in an essay on the reception of the Book of Revelation in England from the sixteenth through to the early eighteenth centuries that “the elucidation of the meaning of scripture was, and is, always an act of interpreting and commenting on the exegete’s own time,” that “from the sixteenth century revelation was inextricably linked to reformation and the apocalyptic with the political.” 268 Sharpe’s argument derives largely from an overview of the many “Geneva-style” commentaries I have discussed in my survey of the apocalyptic tradition. What distinguishes his essay from earlier scholarly assessments is the attention he grants to the way “in which readers annotations, the typography and especially the advice given in the prefaces to various commentaries. He illustrates the diverse range of advice found in these prefaces, including examples of how readers should interpret this most difficult of books, and of when others more qualified should intervene and interpret for them. Some authors limit a reader’s interpretation (King James’s Paraphrase ), while others encourage constant reinterpretation (Dent’s Ruine of Rome ) of the Apocalypse. 269 What Sharpe’s essay insists, and what my chapter has also illustrated, is that any study or use of the
267 T. L. Babylon is Fallen (1597) STC 15111. Cyrus Hoy , Introduction suggests the short pamphlet may have provided the model for Dekker’s three kings. For a detailed discussion of the work, see Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge:“Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 268 Sharpe, “Reading Revelations: Prophecy, Hermeneutics and Politics in Early Modern England,” Reading and Politics in Early Modern England , eds. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 153–154, 127. 269 Sharpe, “Reading Revelations” 129–132.
185
FIGURE 10
The Holy Bible (London, 1599) STC 2178, 3O6v. Reproduced with permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Room (call number knox 00912).
186
Apocalypse in early modern England was always an act of interpretation that stretched beyond theological matters to politics and secular history. To study The VVhore of
Babylon is to ask: How did Dekker read the Apocalypse, and how did he expect his readers to receive his interpretation? There is no simple answer to these two questions; but one way of coming close to an answer is by immersing ourselves in the apocalyptic tradition Dekker worked in, especially the interpretive models produced for Protestant readers like him.
The text-commentary relationship found in Geneva Bibles and contemporary editions of the Apocalypse figured as a hermeneutic model for Dekker’s description of the Whore of Babylon and his understanding of the wounded beast from Revelation. To read Dekker’s play in these places is to read the Bible itself, or, at least a Protestant interpretation of it. These moments function as commentary to the personal and national crises experienced during Elizabeth’s reign, much in the way the Geneva commentary elucidates scripture. Moreover, the mixture of apocalyptic imagery and Tudor episode alerts us to Dekker’s use of two systems of time, one that is linear and one that is typological. It is here we find the connection with the Gunpowder Plot, for when we read the play in light of the responses to this national crisis we see a connection between past and present, or in apocalyptic terms, two acts perpetrated by the same Whore of Babylon.
As we saw in the analogy-based responses by King James, Edward Coke and
Martin Fotherby—what we might call the state response—the Gunpowder Plot was rarely articulated as an event but instead as the culmination of a connected series of past events.
For the king, it was “the two great and fearfull domesdays,” for Edward Coke, it was the twenty years of Jesuit activity, “the ashes of former treasons,” and for Martin Fotherby, it
187 was “ Anno 1588” that helped him make sense of the Gunpowder Plot. The VVhore of
Babylon is no different, for in its allegorical, apocalyptic chronicle of Elizabeth’s reign it too looks to past examples to explain the Gunpowder Plot; it rehearses former treasons such as Anno 1588 while never forgetting the final domesday still to come.
188
CODA
When I began work on this thesis, I envisioned it as a study in biography—as an investigation into how a particular set of plays recorded the lives of some of England’s most famous royals. My methodological approach, as I saw it then, would be to examine how these plays measured up against the existing historical records: i.e. how the plays compared with the familiar prose accounts found in Edward Hall’s Vnion of the Two
Noble Families (2 nd ed. 1550), Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (2 nd ed. 1587) and John
Stow’s Annales (1592). With the thesis now complete, I see that my initial vision for this project, while not entirely wrongheaded, depended on certain incorrect assumptions. It is worth revisiting these assumptions and how they have since been corrected because they have forced me to re-think how I classify and analyze not only the works in the thesis but also the historical literature in early modern England as a whole.
1. While I initially believed that the thesis would largely be an examination of
secular history, I have since discovered that the plays and pageantry on the
Tudor royals are primarily interested in political-religious matters, and as such
cannot be appreciated without a knowledge of the Reformation and its impact
on English culture.
2. While I initially believed that the plays chronicle lives, I have since
discovered that the plays use lives polemically, and thus often distort the
chronicle record to address particular post-Reformation issues.
3. While I initially believed that the historical moment in which the plays and
pageantry were first staged would be of limited importance to my larger
argument, I have since discovered that the particularities of the years 1603–
189
1607 provide the essential context for reading these works. Indeed, the major
events of the first four years of the Stuart reign, including the Hampton Court
Conference, the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations, and the Gunpowder Plot,
had an impact on the shaping of both English foreign and domestic policies.
Each of these events was connected to, and sometimes the direct reason for,
the state’s renewed interest in the subject of religious toleration; and each of
these events triggered a major response from writers of pamphlets, polemics
and, as the thesis has shown, plays and pageantry.
By looking to the Tudor past, and particularly the stories of the royals chronicled in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments , dramatists writing in the first years of James’s reign used the past to engage with the nation’s current post-Reformation concerns. In doing so, they followed the examples of Stuart ecclesiasts and lawyers who also often cited the actions and initiatives of Tudor royals to establish a precedent for the creation of new legislation on religion. In other words, Stuart playgoers who attended the first performances of Dekker’s, Rowley’s, and Heywood’s plays—or even Jonson’s and
Shakespeare’s—experienced more than depictions of the Tudors on stage for the first time. What they witnessed—what they were being asked to engage with—were the dominant political-religious controversies of their own time. 270 For Stuart audiences, the
Tudor past would have been present.
270 Richard Dutton’s recent work has shown that both Shakespeare and Jonson were also writing topical drama. See his “‘Methinks the truth should live from age to age’: The Dating and Contexts of Henry V, ” Huntington Library Quarterly 68.1/2 (2005): 173–203 and Ben Jonson, Volpone and The Gunpowder Plot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
190
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